With a lot less drama than feared we finished the new fence, doubling the (future) space for growing vegetables. We had calculated that we should have just enough mesh to do the job, including swinging the old back fence up the side and partly along the back. The moment of truth was Thursday morning, after everything else was in place. It went surprisingly smoothly, avoiding a wallaby-sized gap and panic-shopping for mesh. The only hiccups were redoing the occasional post because we hit a submerged rock or it was intolerably out of line. Finishing one task creates another: “we” can now get busy building almost close to 40 more garden beds over coming months.

At the other end of the growing timeline, we’ve been enjoying more fruits of our efforts months ago. With great anticipation we emptied the first of the potato bags that we planted in our first week here. Their beautiful deep purple colouring compensated for the slightly disappointing yield. In a rookie error we forgot to weigh them but it was around 1kg. We also enjoyed our first broccoli (planted in mid December) and debating when is optimal to harvest the increasingly orange pumpkins. Debates over the what to do with our green tomatoes continue. Consequently some are now hanging in the shed, some are on the bench with apples, some are still in the ground and some are destined for green tomato relish.

To continue practicing patience, we’ve planted more slow-growing crops. The garlic is probably most exciting given that we have to wait until December (ish) to taste it. We made a tiny dent in our 10kg box, planting 136 cloves along the fence. Given that they will be in the ground for so long we realised we should plant them more densely in future (everything is more obvious after the first time). We also planted out the brussels sprouts, which involved our first bed flip: pulling out the hodgepodge in our very first bed, adding a little more compost, raking, planting the seedlings and covering them with insect netting. The changeover took us 83 minutes but we left space for easy gains next time if we can just remember all tools and containers that we’ll need. If I’m lucky – and the spreadsheet is more accurate than it has been – I’ll be eating brussels sprouts on my birthday.