Spent the afternoon doing a bit of garden prep work before going away to my parents' place for the week.
Yesterday I put some dry bedding (oak and eucy leaves) in the chook pen, and covered the top with a piece of galvo sheeting to help prevent it getting soggy again. It's a portable pen, so moving it to a drier patch would have been ideal, but not happening time-wise. Today I added a feed bag full of pine needles that we collected from beside the road coming home from church. So I can rest easy knowing that the two chookie girls aren't straight on muddy ground... and they'll mix it all up and break it down into fantastic compost.
There's likely frost predicted for the week coming. We've had hardly any so far this year, so I had to make sure my frost tender things were sheltered. The tamarillo has a couple of sheets of fibreglass roofing making a cylinder around it, with shadecloth closing in the top. The young curry tree, young lemon myrtle, leaf cardamon, pineapple sage and some other small plants are in a large clear plastic storage tub with a small piece of poly carb over the top. The cherry guava is a bit tougher, so I think it'll be OK next to the house.
Planted one more packet of seeds. An out of date but still sealed packet of red onions. If they don't grow I'll just put something else in on top of them.
And I picked some fresh herbs and vegs to take with me. Silverbeet, kale, parsley, two small fennel bulbs, some celery, and some ripe tomatoes and yellow sweet chillis that are still growing. Too often the supermarket vegs come in packs or bunches that are more than I'll eat in the time I'm there, and the greens are never all that fresh anyway. I don't think there will be much growing up their end unless the peas and broad beans I planted last winter have self seeded. The summer was too hot and dry for everything else I planted.
