The Kitchen Garden blog is kindly supplied by Rachel Knight. Rachel operates The Kitchen Garden from her home in Wellington and runs fresh food gardening and organic courses for beginners. Each week we'll keep you updated about Rachel's garden news along with some of her valuable advice about gardening and growing. We hope you enjoy Rachel's blogs.
If left to their own devices, most hens stop laying over winter
‘Two bolts in a bag’ is a family idiom for making a small amount of progress on a project every day
Soup is a great winter lunch option - leek and potato, pumpkin or watercress are all delicious and relatively portable
Here Rachel from the Kitchen Garden provides advice on how to safely store seeds...
Pickings can get a bit thin in winter, even for free ranging chooks. Here a few treats for your chooks...
There are some beautiful fresh New Zealand chestnuts in the markets and on roadside stalls
The perfect lunch is a couple of figs on some wild rocket leaves, a few scraps of proscuitto and some shavings of grana padano cheese dressed with a glug of olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice
On a sunny day with a big southerly blowing, it is of course the perfect place to hide
I’m always trying to start things early and get ahead of myself in the garden. Nature however does little to cooperate
If you're interested in keeping honey bees, why not include some trees for bees?
If you’ve raised some chicks and have a rooster or two beginning to find his voice, I’ll be running a workshop this Sunday 11 April 2010 at 9am at The Kitchen Garden for you to learn how to slaughter and prepare your birds for the table
If your beans are doing as well as mine, you’ll need one of these bean slicers that strings and slices flat beans in one
Ask not what your soil can do for you…. ask what you can do for your soil
I welcome newborn calf Frida. She has a half-brother, Felix, and a half-sister, Flora
Give the gift of pumpkin. I’ve been delighted to receive a pumpkin from each of two friends who’ve been to visit recently
Don’t bother with green zucchinis next year. Yellow ones fruit earlier and are much easier to spot amongst the leaves so you won’t end up with unexpected marrows
It’s time to buy seeds for your winter crops - a sowing before the end of February and another one before the end of March will make your garden more resilient to the variability of weather
I’m not selling vegetables this year but will be running a ‘weekly’* draw during the summer for a box of seasonal produce
I’ll be running the final fresh food garden course of the season on Saturday 6 March 2010 12 noon to 5.30pm. Just nine places so please book early
Dwarf or bush beans are a good alternative to climbing beans in Wellington as they don’t get blown about quite as much - or at least it’s easier to provide them with shelter
A cauliflower in the sunshine. I’d convinced myself I couldn’t grow cauliflowers, but it looks as if I was wrong
The climbing beans can’t decide up which stick to climb. Every time they make a decision they get blown back down
Rachel Knight operates The Kitchen Garden from her home in Ohariu Valley, 25 minutes from Wellington
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