With almost all the beds laid in the garden (and no mulch at the moment) it is time to restart fence building. Our first fence was only half the area we want the gardens to be because: (a) we knew that we knew next to nothing about fencing, (b) we needed to be as fast as possible given the nightly wallaby raids, and (c) we could then postpone the inevitable long discussions about the exact direction of the new beds given the slope they’ll be on. Now we have at least some idea of fencing and things are proceeding much more smoothly. And thankfully we’re on a less demanding timetable – we just want vegetables or green manure on all beds before winter. But nothing is ever perfectly smooth. We still needed to pull out four star pickets: three because we hit impenetrable submerged rocks and one that was out of line.

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Another piece of infrastructure that was much easier the second time around was extending the irrigation to the tunnel. The web of hoses at the main tap (at times almost tangled like earphones) was unwieldy and we threatened to knock out seedlings whenever we watered in the tunnel. I also found this second time much easier because my task was to stand at the other end of my property turning the water supply on and off as Alex needed until he had identified and fixed all leaky joints. But Alex also thought it was easier (maybe for the same reason). Watering in the tunnels is now infinitely easier and it lets us delay a decision about whether to install driplines or sprinklers.

As the days become shorter and colder it feels like the window for preparing for winter is closing. (It’s much easier to be optimistic on sunny days!) We have a basic plan but the menu in September is fairly limited, with the harvest spreadsheet predicting four vegetables! My task is to figure out what will survive outside during the winter and Alex’s is to maximise the value from the tunnel. It turns out carrot, radish, turnips, swedes and beetroot can be stored in the ground until we want to eat them. And there’s a range of leafy greens that should become dormant in winter and be ready for eating in September. So seed propagation continues. We were quite excited when our garlic order – a 10kg box – arrived in the mail. But if I’d known I would have collected it from the post office sooner! No-one complained about the smell fortunately. We’ll plant it next week after a little bit of research. We did plant our feathery asparagus seedlings so their roots have some time to grow before winter but we have to wait until 2022 to try them.

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The other plan to have some variety in our winter meals is to preserve what we harvest now. Unfortunately my inefficiency at peeling vegetables and heat-processsing jars makes the trade-off with planting very high! But at the very least I will have learned something from the long podcasts that accompany the processing. This week we added to our winter supplies: frozen beans, more canned apple, apple sauce, apple scrap vinegar (hopefully), pickled beetroot and frozen basil and cashew pesto. Passata is looking unlikely but we might get a green tomato relish. If everything goes well and nothing spoils it will be lovely to have some variety during winter… Time will tell!

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