Garden Journals: Plant Garage Sale

We've been talking a while about how to make our rental feel like our place since there's not a lot that we can actually do or afford. So all through winter we've been conspiring to see if we can talk the landlords into letting us put in some potted plants and maybe some vegetables. Well, they told us to have at it. Yay.

Neither of us have done much gardening, so between Google, Robyn (that's Stephen's mum), and the tips we've picked up randomly, we managed to put in a garden that worked with our budget.

Round #1:
A few weeks ago, we picked up some perpetual spinach (Robyn's recommendation because they keep producing for about six months), lettuce, parsley, rosemary, thyme and fennel from King's (we went to the Remuera store at 236 Orakei Road).

Lettuce and Spinach: We've made 3 big dinners (read: either we fed another 2 people or had enough for lunch the next day) from our lettuce and spinach harvest so far, and there's nothing quite like eating the stuff from your garden.

Rosemary and Thyme: It's still fairly winter-ish in Auckland, so we wanted to sturdy, low-maintenance herbs that would keep producing for a while. Stephen has found that we use a lot less herbs when we are using the fresh stuff as opposed to the dried stuff we have been using -- which is awesome!

Parsley: We use a fair amount of parsley just about everyday, but we got these as little seedlings so we haven't quite touched them yet. We also learnt that parsley is self-seeding, which means if we were to keep it in a big enough pot (or better yet, sow it into the garden), it will just keep reproducing (works the same with coriander/cilantro, apparently, except coriander doesn't like being repotted).

Fennel: I'm not entirely sure what we're going to do with the fennel since I've not really cooked with it (if you have suggestions of how to use it, PLEASE let me know!) -- we picked it up because it was part of a 5 punnets for $10 deal and nothing else looked good.

Round #2:
We needed more potting mix, and Robyn introduced us to planting in buckets, so Stephen picked up 4 big bags of potting mix and twelve buckets from Bunnings on the way home from work last night. He also picked up more lettuce and perpetual spinach since they were doing so well, as well as coriander and tomatoes.

And because he's the best hubby of all, he also picked me up a little lavender plant :)

Stephen had also signed us up on Neighbourly so we could find out if there was anything exciting happening in our hood. Well, it so happened that there was a lady in St Helier's who was doing a plant garage sale for bulbs and plants ranging from between $0.50 to $5, so we popped in first thing this morning. We picked up two little marjoram plants, two baby orchids with a few other bulbs with them, two lemon balms, a couple of bromeliads, a baby loquat, and some baby succulents -- all for $10.

We had picked up five big plastic tubs ($5 each from The
Warehouse) for our wedding to use as drink chillers, and seeing as they had been sitting on top of our fridge for the last 6.5 months collecting dust, we turned three of them into pots as well. Stephen put holes into all the plastic tubs so that the plants would drain and we managed to get all the plants repotted before the rain started!

Just to make sure our plants were safe from birds, snails and slugs (the landlord's cats have surprisingly left all the plants alone), we picked up some bamboo sticks, cable ties and netting from Look Sharp (we went to the Mt Wellington store at 72 Lunn Ave).

And now we finally have a garden! We still have a few more things we would
like to do, but we're quite happy with the current turn-out. This has also been a fun little project that will keep us entertained for a while. It has cost a little bit of money, but we're going to get so much in return!

Thanks for reading!