Spring Gardening & Making A Large Arbor for Fruits

During March & April we planted seeds in trays and my wife & 4 year old daughter spent time in the garden making a small flower garden.



Our young & inquisitive girl often draws flowers when playing with pens & paper so I was keen for her to experience planting seeds and watching them blossom into beautiful flowers she could see the development of on her way to & from kindergarten each day.



Within a few weeks each time she walked by she was enjoying seeing the colours developing each day & I could see her interest developing.



The garden always looks it's best in the spring & we were pleased to see clover sprouting again to make the garden green once more.



I came to realise as summer begun that clover and all the flowers we'd introduced made a big difference to having more bees, which in turn meant greater amounts of vegetables produced and probably, as the seasons continue - more fruits too.

These are flowering plants in the front drive area - which are particularly pretty in the spring.


There will be lots of pruning to be done over winter & early spring.


Using thinner pieces of tree trunk from trees we'd brought down during the winter, with Jun's help we made a large arbor. As it's located in an area with plenty of sun, the intention is to grow kiwi and grapes on this structure. The pictures below don't show the roof, which was built shortly after these were taken, but perhaps that's for the best as next year we can show how the rose, grape & kiwi vines will have developed over the course of a year. Within a few years we hope to be able to harvest such fruits as we sit beneath them sheltered from the summer sun.







This spring I too learnt something elementary but important: Seeds don't keep unless they're kept very cold! Most of the seeds we had bought last year and kept in cool, dark but room temperature storage had failed to sprout! Still, we often learn from making mistakes, so we resigned to visiting the local home / garden centres and bought small plants of the things available we wanted to grow. Most of them were planted a day or two before we packed our things and headed off to New Zealand for the beginning of May where we'd spend a month... As a last resort I went out and threw most of the seeds into the garden, but only the Arugola really took. A great lesson learnt. Next year we'll be ready with fresh seeds and lots of different varieties, including some perenneal vegetables too such as artichoke & asparagus!