It is Saturday in Palmerston North, and while I am writing this, nice showers are wetting the soil and plants are growing in response.
It has been a poor spring and summer so far for gardening, but hopefully conditions will improve in February, if they don’t then it’s going to be a bad season overall. [...]

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I would like to wish all our readers a very Merry Xmas and a Happy Gardening New Year.
It is a very great pleasure to bring you gardening information each week and to hear about your successes and problems.
Your emails and phone calls contribute a lot to these columns and sometimes when stuck for a topic, one [...]

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With our new baby arriving soon and so many people away over the summer we have decided to let this newsletter cover January as well.
We finally got our chickens last weekend, Bella and Rose. One is a Sussex and the other a Barred rock.  We are going to be using their manure to put lots [...]

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Of all the how-to gardening tips friends and clients could ask of New Zealand’s landscape-design star, Xanthe White says people mostly quiz her about growing veges.
It’s clear that vegetable gardening is big again, for both money-saving, eco and health reasons, but many people don’t know how to get growing in the first place.
So, here’s a [...]

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The met service has reported that we had the warmest August ever since records began with about 1.5 degrees above average, which does not seem a much on those odd cold days, but for a lot of insect pests it means an early arrival.
A good hard, cold winter takes its toll on insect populations from [...]

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The weather may not be the best but each day the daylight hours increase by a few more minutes and our plants and gardens respond to this increasing amount of light. We are only about 6 weeks away from the beginning of spring and there is much to do in this time so that you [...]

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Potassium Permanganate (Condy’s Crystals) has numerous uses in gardening as well as in other areas. I remember as a boy that if one had a sore throat a mild tincture of Condy’s Crystals would be made up to use as a gargle. This would hopefully kill the bacteria which was causing the sore throat. [...]

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We’ve all heard how dark green leafy vege are packed with nutrients such as vitamins A, C, and K, folate, iron, calcium and fibre.  The even better news is – they’re delicious in soups, healthy smoothies or as a side dish.  If you haven’t got some sivlerbeet, spinach, coloured chard or kale ready to pick [...]

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May is one of my favourite times of the year when the days are still warm, the evenings a tad chilly but most importantly all my berry bushes are producing at an astounding rate.  I had great ambitions to make jams and jellies and cute little cup cakes filled with berries. So what went wrong?  [...]

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It’s official, vege gardening is the hottest topic around and everyone is eager to know more!  Last year, the Autumn home show surveys filled in by attendees indicated that vege gardening was the No.1 interest that people wanted to find out more about.  In response to that Patch from Scratch were invited to exhibit there [...]

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