The weather is warmer, the days are longer and the locals say that the worst of winter is behind us. So we’ve started our seeds for next season. Thanks to a friend (and my hoarding tendencies), Alex has started our early tomatoes for the tunnel using a heat mat and bubble wrap. After four days we had the first little tomato plants.  Now we “just” need to continue tricking them into thinking it’s springtime. We’ve also started trays of spring onions, lettuce and herbs with lower germination temperatures in the hope that our laundry is warm enough for them to germinate. Spring onions have been tricky – they seem to like “walking” out of the seed trays so we’re still experimenting with some different ways of sowing them. We sowed the first radish of the season in the garden and we’ll see how close my estimate of “seasonal variation”  of 14 days turns out to be (i.e. 14 days in addition to the usual 30 days to harvest). If all goes well we will have radish for our first customers.

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It was also a week filled with wonderful exchanges and gifts. On Monday we swapped some baby fennel for a huge bowl of lemons from our local olive farm (which incidentally is having free community picking days this coming week). On Tuesday an older neighbour offered us a huge pile sawdust (the wrong type was delivered to her and she wanted it taken away). Alex insisted on moving it in the back of our car, which was lined with a tarp, rather than borrowing another neighbour’s trailer. But the job got done, the sawdust will help us balance our compost as we add green waste over time and the car is cleaner than beforehand (after my vacuuming). On Sunday, another neighbour brought over his cows which will eat our grass and produce compost ingredients as they grow. So it really was a week full of reminders of how lucky we are to be here.

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Meanwhile learning continued. It turns out the little eggs I’ve been finding in some of our seedling trays were probably slug eggs. So I shouldn’t have left them alone after all. I remember being advised to learn the top five pests throughout their life cycle – it’s time to follow up on that. Some little animals have learned that we plant broad beans in the ground for them. It seems we have to grow them in trays first to give them a fighting chance. A happier discovery was that wallabies and pademelons don’t like eating Tasmanian Pepperberry trees. And I do like pepperberries.