It is so good to feel the warmth and joy of spring! We have had a pleasant winter, in my opinion, but spring is something wonderful. Here are some things I love about spring:

• New life in the garden! 
• Planting food for the next season 
• Birds
• Warmer and longer days
• Weekends spent completely outside
• Outdoor barbecues whenever we want
• Lighter, brighter mornings
• Baby chicks! 
• Wearing skirts and dresses and sandals 
• Our daughters’ birthdays 

    
   
The past couple of weekends have been pretty interesting in our garden. It is always exciting seeing the plants come back to life, so to speak, after the winter. We are seeing peach, apricot, almond and plum blossoms in our orchard. Broad beans, garlic, daikon radish and silver beet are doing really well and we even have some crazy strawberries that are trying to fruit! 

We need to organise the polytunnel to prepare it for the summer growing. First we’ll enclose the chooks in there to do their scatching and manuring. Then we will put compost and mulch down. We’ll plant a lot of tomatoes and cucumbers in there, but our pumpkins and zucchinis will be better off outside. I’ll be planting them amongst the trees in the orchard, where berries, rhubarb and other small edible plants are growing. Our plan is to really create a permaculture food forest.

[I did my Permaculture design course this year. I’m so interested in all things permaculture. I should write about it more. Time for blogging is a bit scarce for me right now and is something I am working on.]

Anyway, this weekend we got the children to help us choose seeds for our garden. We really want them to get right into the garden this season, really give them a sense of ownership and pride about the food we grow. Maybe they’ll even be more open to eating their vegetables! So they chose the seeds, with our help. We went home, cut up toilet rolls, put them in old meat trays (reduce, re-use, recycle!) and filled them up with seed raising mix. The kids planted the seeds out and we are watching them every day as they sit by the window in our dining area. The children keep them nice and moist and I dare say there will be excitement when the first sprouts appear! 

   
   
So, we are looking forward to nuts, beans, peas, zucchinis, pumpkins, tomatoes, cucumbers, stone fruits, garlic, silverbeet, berries, potatoes, herbs… (The list of things we are growing is getting long these days!)

What I am loving is that each year we are getting closer to our goal of providing plenty of our food. It is a welcome reminder that moving here and going on this adventure of homesteading was a great idea! 

Happy spring! 

xox