Pausing a farm is a bit tricky, even without any animals (except our hard-working worms of course). But we hit slow-motion while we said good-bye to Alex’s dad. He used to like reading this blog. Thankfully Alex was able to be in Melbourne for 10 days and I attended the funeral – trips that one can’t take for granted anymore. The future greenhouse will be in his memory. He loved any building-related project.

Things were mostly fine while Alex was away (even if no new compost pile appeared). But we did have two days of strong winds, when gusts reached 70km/hr – the strongest in some years apparently and not at all fun. The polytunnel’s plastic covering started to loosen on day one but some friends helped retie the plastic and it survived day two. Closing the tunnel to protect it against the wind created wonderfully tropical conditions for the tomatoes and cucumbers but the lettuce also soared upwards so this weekend was our first weekend without lettuce. Surprisingly there wasn’t much damage to the vegetables. The strong winds battered the peas and I think blew some baby beetroots out of the ground (is that possible?) but we were really very lucky not to lose more plants.

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Of course the plants kept on growing, or at least, the ones that aren’t in terrible compost did. The peas are still pumping. The rainbow chard is vibrant and the spring onions are bright green. Our bed with pumpkin plants, corn and nasturtiums is taking off and has become my new favourite. The plants in our borders are starting to finally look stronger and I discovered that we have made some decent soil where the newspaper and mulch from a year ago has decomposed. And we have our first sunflower (of many I hope), which is doubly wonderful because ladybirds seem to like them too.

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