Dear Friends,    

What an amazing time of year in the garden! Everything is all go and so exciting. Limitless possibilities it seems.  We are sowing seeds, prepping ground, transplanting, and mowing the grass heaps which is helping to make great compost! We are also using the grass to mulch our potatoes, which we planted before the 2^nd week of September, to get a head start on the psyllid life cycle.  We get good results with this method which we learned from an organic grower in Mahia.  He doesn't have the frost to contend with, but we use frost cloth and have never looked back. 

Spring has been so busy and productive mostly thanks to our intern Caitlin Bell.  Caitlin arrived at the end of August and stepped right in! Thanks to her experience from working at Weleda and having her own gardens we are on top of everything for once...or at least mostly on top of everything! Our daughter, River Rose, and her get on beautifully which is amazingly helpful too!  We are so grateful for the two way benefits of having interns come to learn in our gardens.  We love teaching about what we do and why, and it also nice to have a new perspective on things. Caitlin has studied Biodynamics and has brought some preps with her.  So far we have used CPP (Cow Pat Pit) on the garlic and hope to use Prep 500 for the first time in our new gardens.  Having dabbled in Biodynamics before, it is nice to have the inspiration and knowledge shared, so we can do a bit more this season. 

We have an exciting Workshop Series planned for November 4^th and 5^th 2017, so don't miss out if you are wanting a bit of inspiration for your garden or have an interest in DIY in the garden or Tiny House's. Come to one or all three workshops offered. Camping facilities available, please enquire.

•         Getting Out of the Debt Trap: Budget Tiny House Construction – November 4^th 10:00am – 4:00pm

•         Garden Design and Implementation – November 5^th 9:00am – 12:00pm

•         DIY Handyman Skills for the Self Sufficient Lifestyler – November 5^th 1:00pm – 4:00pm

See our website for more details and to register.

How is everybody's garlic doing!? Please do let us know, we can report so far so good.  We have the yellow tips which seem to be par for the course when growing garlic on the early varieties and just starting to show on the main crop garlic, but so far rust seems to be staying away! Interestingly, when researching rust earlier this year, I learned the yellow tips on garlic is also a fungal issue, although much less of a problem. We have been pumping the foliar feeds trying to keep the plants at optimum health and we are also making a seaweed tea to feed the roots. 

Things to sow now:

October is a good time to do some back up successions if you have not already of the frost tender heat loving crops.  We always successive sow tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, courgettes, cucumbers and pumpkins.  We also, sometimes do successions of corn and beans. We do this to insure we get a crop even if frost or something else takes out our first plantings. This can be a bit harder in a smaller garden, but if you plan to do succession planting from the get go, you do not have to plant as much each time and in theory your crops will take up the same amount of space as well as stagger your harvest over a longer period of time! Win-win in my book.  We always plant corn and beans this month either direct in the ground, but to protect from frost, we usually get them going in trays in our glasshouse for transplanting in November. We also get another succession of lettuces like Tree, Speckled,
Odell's and Mignonette going with maybe one last fast growing brassica sowing like Rocket, Mizuna and Tat Soi. Don't forget flowers!!!! Companion flowers often get side stepped in favour of space for edible crops, but they are very important for the balance in the garden to be maintained, they attract all the beneficial insects and pollinators to your garden and provide much needed pollen for the bees! We sow our Cosmos Sunset, Marigold Naughty Marietta, Zinnia Chromosia this month for sure. Of course you can sow all sorts of other things too if you have not already like, Calendula, Stock, Hollyhocks, Echinacea, Sweet William, and Phacelia to name a few.

Remember the size of your garden and your time constraints when sowing seeds.  It can be very easy to go overboard at this stage and then not have enough room or try to cram everything in at the expense of quality.  So hold back on numbers if you want variety, or make more gardens! Giving away seedlings is a great neighbourly activity or hosting a plant swap can be a great way to share the love this time of year and talk gardening with other locals.

Wishing you all a great season!

Our Website is the best place to find the most up to date information on what we have available at all times during the year.

We encourage orders through this medium but of course we will still except orders via email from our Catalogue or via the post using our printed order form.

If you know of someone who would like our seeds and is not online, send us their postal address and we can get a printed catalogue to them.

And here is our   Order Form PDF  or Order Form Excell

Email orders from the catalogue to: sethasseeds@outlook.com 

Or post order forms to: Setha's Seeds PO Box 60, Tutira 4181

Happy gardening,

Roddy, Setha and River Rose