Dear Friends,
Winter Solstice is here, and with it the time of year for sitting by the fire, enjoying the successes from the summer garden each night as you eat through what you managed to store, can, freeze or ferment from the gardens bounty. Also, if you planted a winter garden you should have ample winter greens to keep you healthy too! We are at the moment enjoying our heritage potatoes-too many varieties to name here, Chucks Winter Pumpkins, Lyon Leeks, Yams and our Pukekohe Long Keeper Onions as well as our Red Breeding Project Onions which are keeping better and better the more we select for this trait. We are also harvesting heaps of fresh salad greens, carrots, beets and herbs from the garden as well as kale, cabbage and silverbeet. Suffice to say, we are not going hungry this winter!
Please note, we have SOLD OUT of our SEED grade garlic for this season. A huge thank you to all the gardeners who purchased their seed from us! We are planting out more garlic this year to try to meet demand, so for those of you who missed out this year hopefully next year we will have enough to go around. We will start selling our SEED grade garlic again from January 2016 next year.
On that note, if you are still looking for some garlic to plant, we will be selling once our planting season is over some of our smaller cloves from the centre of our SEED grade. When we bust up our SEED garlic for planting we remove the smaller cloves to insure we are always improving our seed. If planted these cloves will grow and produce reasonable bulbs if they are well fertilized and tended. Of course if you are short of eating garlic, they could easily be used for cooking too. So watch this space if you are still keen, we will notify you when we have our 2nd grade cloves are in stock.
We are in the process of putting together our 2015/16 Catalogue! It is a very exciting time of year for us, as all season long we grow and tend the seed crops, hoping that they are successful and pass germination testing so that we can share the seed with you all. Our germination tests have shown that all new seed grown out this last season will be in our new catalogue! So expect lots of new and exciting things to try. We will be sending out our new catalogue soon, to give you ample time to plan your gardens.
Things to Sow in the Garden Now:
Garlic Planting time is well and truly here! If you have not already planted your garlic seed, now is the time. Remember to plant in well -drained soil, to prevent the cloves from rotting if the winter proves a wet one. We always form rounded raised beds for our garlic in the biointensive style. After planting we highly recommend applying a think mulch to keep your garlic warm, moist and weed free.
For all your seed requirements here is our catalogue.
Reminder that our seeds are also available from Cornucopia Organics in Hastings and Waipawa Wholefoods in Waipawa.
Wishing you all a warm and happy solstice,
Roddy and Setha
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