Gardening In New Zealand

The flowers are blooming, birds, are chirping and I am pretty certain that summer is fast arriving in Masterton!

I thought since it's our first summer gardening that I would do a quick post at the beginning and then talk about any issues we have along the way (or hopefully incredible success! haah). We are brand new to gardening so it's all a bit of an experiment. For starters, we dealt with our first major pest - aphids. I had never seen such a thing before, but these beautiful flowers up top, were completely covered in them before they bloomed. I researched all about it and decided to spray them with Key Pyrethrum. There are mixed reviews on how organic this product is, but since we aren't eating the flowers I thought I would give it a go and see how it went. It completely cured the problem and got rid of the aphids overnight...I have to say that I was incredibly impressed. Two weeks later, all the flowers started blooming!!

Travis built this raised bed garden for us to start planting some yummy vegetables. We are starting small and gradual and see how we go this year. He planted cucumbers, capsicum, lettuce, and spinach....So far it's all coming up (except the capsicum, but I am pretty sure they take ages to sprout)

This is gonna be my yummy lettuce...And Spinach...And cucumber...Or at least that is what it looks like to me...It's still early days so it's hard to tell how well these plants will do, or if the little birds/insects will have their fill and leave us with damaged goods...It's all a bit of an experiment, really.

* A funny side note that I had to update the pictures above because I mistook a weed for our baby spinach! haha....In actual fact, when these things are first growing the weeds look more like the vegetable than the vegetable itself!....Guess we are also good at growing weeds!