Happy Equinox!

March 21, 2026March 20, 2026 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Here we are at the autumnal equinox! Hard to believe my garden year is three-quarters over. But the days are feeling very short, and the vegetable garden is slowing down.

Despite the short days and cool weather, the harvest is really just getting going. I picked over 64 kg of pumpkins last weekend, and there are more to bring in. I’ve been harvesting dry beans for weeks, and will continue for another few weeks as they mature on the plants. Most haven’t been weighed in yet, because they’re still drying, but I’ve recorded over 4 kg so far, and I estimate my final total will be around 10 kg.

Sweet corn is at its peak at the moment, and one of these days soon, I’ll be picking and freezing a whole lot, because we can’t keep up with it, despite having corn on the cob pretty much every day for dinner (it’s a rough life…).

The popcorn still has a few weeks of maturing on the plant before it will be ready to harvest, and there are still two apple trees and a pear awaiting harvest.

Meanwhile, the summer crops continue to trickle in at a pace to keep us feasting.

In total so far, since the winter solstice, the garden has given us over 526 kilograms of fruit and vegetables and 490 eggs.

Having not bought vegetables in about 20 years, I was curious about the monetary value of our garden, so I checked the prices of a few of the currently in-season vegetables at the grocery store. I was, quite frankly, shocked at how expensive fresh vegetables have become.

Some quick calculations …

Our garden has (so far) produced this year:

$388 worth of zucchini
$348 worth of tomatoes
$379 worth of potatoes
$30 worth of onions
$235 worth of pumpkin
$60 worth of chilli peppers
$192 worth of green beans
$287 worth of garlic
$47 worth of carrots

And most of these calculations are based on the price of conventionally grown (not organic) vegetables, because organic options weren’t available at the store.

Just that short list of vegetables adds up to over $2000, and it doesn’t include any of the expensive berry fruits we produce. And, of course, it doesn’t take into account that we grow things that you simply can’t buy in the grocery store—delicious, but non-commercial crops like ugniberries and quince, heirloom tomatoes that can’t survive shipping, colourful carrot varieties. Add to that the fact that our vegetables have been off the plant for minutes when we cook them, versus days or weeks for the sad specimens in the grocery store, and it is clear that the value of our garden can’t be measured by an instrument as blunt as price. Still, it’s good to know that the hundreds of dollars I spend each year on seeds, pea straw, and other garden supplies are more than paid back in food.

Just three months to go to complete our garden year. The tally continues as delicious fruit and vegetables roll in!

Happy autumn (or spring, if you’re in the northern hemisphere)!

Summer Soup 2026

March 5, 2026 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Last Saturday was Summer Soup Day—the day I make vegetable soup to last through the winter. As usual, I started just after breakfast, around 7 am. Picking and chopping vegetables, with my husband’s help, took until nearly lunchtime.

We filled both of our largest stock pots (16-litres and 18-litres) with soup, and our 12-litre pot full of vegetable offcuts for stock. Just getting all that soup to a boil took nearly an hour, and then it had to be processed in the canner. It was a long day in the kitchen.

A long time to contemplate soup.

We’ve been making summer soup for close to twenty years, now. Each year it is slightly different. Each year reflects the summer’s weather and our garden wins and fails for the year. It truly is an encapsulation of the summer.

This year, the summer soup was full of beautiful carrots—long and straight, including some fabulous purple carrots. The soup is a record of my successful raised carrot bed born of my frustration at previous carrot crop failures.

This year’s soup contains blazing hot jalapeño from a plant a friend gave me, because my jalapeño plants (a variety called Jalapeño Early, which is milder) were devoured by slugs as seedlings.

This year, the summer soup is devoid of sweet peppers, reflecting the cool, wet weather that has delayed ripening and rotted peppers on the plants.

This year’s soup is rich in green beans, which are often long over by the time I make soup. Planting only runner beans this year, instead of mostly dwarf varieties, gave me a longer season.

This year, there’s less sweet corn in the summer soup than usual, the result of abysmal germination in my first sweet corn planting.

Despite the cool, wet weather, germination woes, and devouring slugs which have affected this year’s soup, it is delicious, as it is every year. It is a slice of summer’s bounty, bottled up to remind us of sunshine and warmth on days when both are scarce.

The tally at the end of the day was 25 litres of soup, and 6 litres of vegetable stock (plus the two dozen cupcakes I made while waiting for the jars to run through the canner). I pulled the final jars out of the canner at 8 pm.

A long day, but worth every moment.

February in the Garden

February 19, 2026 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

We’ve had an overabundance of rain this summer, and not nearly enough heat and sunshine for many of the summer vegetables. Slugs and slaters are running rampant, and fungal pathogens are making an early appearance.

Still, it takes more than too much rain to suppress the exuberance of late summer. The dahlias are blooming, the sweet corn and tomatoes are ripening, and the pears and apples are heavy on the trees. I picked over 40 kilograms of potatoes on Sunday, and we’ve been freezing tons of pasta sauce. It is a time of abundance, despite the summer’s setbacks.

So, I invite you to enjoy my late-summer garden with me on one of our few beautiful sunny days.

Garden Tally Half-year Check-in

December 19, 2025December 17, 2025 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

We’re nearly at the summer solstice, so I thought it was time to do a check-in on the garden tally project I mentioned back at the winter solstice.

Since 21 June, we’ve been keeping a record of all the food that comes out of the garden. Whenever we bring something into the kitchen, we record it in a little notebook I’ve placed there for the purpose. The months of June, July and August include lots of days when we brought in nothing but eggs. No surprise, the dead of winter is a slow time in the vegetable garden.

That’s not to say we weren’t eating from the garden. All winter we enjoyed the stored up bounty from last summer—tomato sauces, pickles, jams, chutneys, pesto, pumpkins, frozen corn and peas … There may have been little fresh coming in, but we didn’t lack for delicious vegetables and fruits.

Since September, the incoming volume from the garden has grown rapidly, and some of the half-year numbers are already staggering, despite the fact that the early onset of summer heat wreaked havoc on the spring crops.

If you ever wondered what 6.6kg of gooseberries looked like …

We’ve harvested over 56 kilograms of vegetables, 40 kilograms of fruit, and 335 eggs since the winter solstice.

Those 56 kg of vegetables only covered about half of our theoretical daily need, but that was the ‘lean’ season, when most of what we were eating was stored food from the previous season. Even as a vegetarian, I didn’t feel any lack of vegetables over winter.

There were also some stand-out individual harvests.

The final sweet pepper from last year’s crop was harvested on 2 August! For those of you in the northern hemisphere, that’s like harvesting peppers in early January. The new greenhouse is truly amazing for extending our growing season.

And it not only extends the later crops, it also gives them an early start. This year, I was disappointed, because the zucchini I planted early for the greenhouse never germinated. So the plant I stuck into the greenhouse was sown at the same time as my outdoor zucchini. Despite this, we harvested the first greenhouse zucchini on 13 December, well before my ‘zucchini by Christmas’ goal.

No matter how small, the first tomato is the best.

Oddly, however, the first ripe tomatoes have come from the outdoor tomato plants. These plants are currently less than half the size of the plants in the greenhouses, and honestly look like they’re only barely hanging on. Yet the Gold Nugget cherry tomatoes are already ripening out there.

All these stats make me eager to see what the second half of the growing year has in store. I was blown away by how much we’ve harvested during the leaner half of the year, but the real harvest has yet to begin.

I hope you all have a lovely solstice full of family, friends, and good food.

Pickling onions, harvested in December, but we’ll eat most of them next winter.

Spectacular Stick Insects

November 27, 2025November 20, 2025 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

One of the first things we did when we bought our new property, even before we built the house, was to establish native plantings. Those plantings have grown spectacularly well, and many of the trees are four metres tall already.

Invertebrate life on the property has increased with the growth of our gardens. Our lush akeake attract katydids, the herb garden is alive with butterflies, native bees, and hover flies. Preying mantids stalk the flowers, snatching up prey. Jumping spiders of several species prowl among the foliage and rocks. And web-building spiders festoon the branches of nearly every plant.

But there are some notable absences. Species that aren’t good at dispersal.

One of those absences is stick insects. Our common native species here in Canterbury are particularly fond of kānuka and mānuka. The kānuka we planted in our gardens has grown beautifully, but is completely devoid of stick insects.

But not for long …

I was recently gifted some stick insect eggs from a researcher who is studying them. I set them up in an aquarium with some kānuka branches and eagerly awaited their hatching. The researcher warned the eggs were a bit old and might not hatch, but over the course of a few days, seven successfully emerged (a few more died in hatching).

The seven stick babies are now happily munching kānuka in captivity. I’ll release them into our garden when they’re a little older and I’m more confident they’ll survive. For now, I’m enjoying watching them in their tank on my desk.

Stick insects are some of my favourite bugs. I love their improbable shape. I love their crypsis-enhancing behaviours—sitting with their forelegs stretched out in front to make them look even more stick-like, and swaying in the ‘wind’ when disturbed.

I also love the fact that many species are parthenogenic—the females can lay fertile eggs without mating with a male. In fact, there are some species of stick insect for which we’ve never found males.

This parthenogenesis is the result of a strange relationship many insects have with the reproductive parasite Wolbachia. Wolbachia is a genus of bacteria that is passed from female insects to their offspring. Because Wolbachia’s spread is only through the females of its host species, it’s in the bacterium’s best interest to eliminate males. It does this by a variety of methods, depending upon the strain of bacteria and the host species. The result is insects in which males are rare or nonexistent and females can reproduce parthenogenically. Its a cool and complex relationship that I find fascinating.

I look forward to establishing stick insects on our native trees. Hopefully my seven lovely babies will grow into a thriving population.

Homemade Potting Mix

November 14, 2025November 7, 2025 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I’ve been frustrated with commercial potting and seed raising mixes in recent years. Not only are they expensive, but my vegetable seedlings languish in them, if they germinate at all.

The culprit is most likely clopyralid herbicide residues in the mixes. Even ‘organic’ compost may have traces of the herbicide in it, because the chemical doesn’t break down easily, and can be found even in manure from animals that have eaten plants sprayed by it.

So this year I decided to try making my own potting mix. The results have been encouraging.

My biggest hurdle to making good potting mix is ridding my compost of weeds. I don’t do hot composting. Though some of my pile will get to the temperature necessary to kill weed seeds, not all of it does. Fortunately, I have an effective way of sterilising compost—the bread oven.

This spring, every time we’ve fired up the bread oven, I’ve used the residual heat, after all the baking is done, to sterilise compost.

I put moist, sieved compost into a restaurant steam tray (lidded) and/or a stock pot (lidded) and put it in the hot oven until the temperature in the centre of the compost reaches 82℃. This takes a couple of hours, as the oven is usually only around 150℃ by the end of baking.

I mix my sterilised compost with coarse landscaping sand in a 2:1 ratio, and voila—my own potting and seed raising mix!

Sterilised soil is prone to fungal outbreaks, because there are no other microorganisms to keep the fungi in check, so when I use my mix, the first watering I give it is a slurry of soil from the garden. This inoculates the mix with the healthy mix of microbes from the garden and avoids excessive fungal growth.

And how did my mix do, compared to commercial mix? Spectacularly well!

Because I didn’t decide to make my own mix until I actually needed it, some of my seeds were planted in commercial ‘organic’ mixes. Many of these seeds failed to germinate this year. Those that did germinate then sat without growing at all until I transferred them to my own mix.

Seeds planted in my own mix germinated well and grew vigorously.

I will definitely be making my own potting mix from now on.

The Carrot Conundrum

November 7, 2025 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I love carrots. I love them cooked into everything from pasta sauce to burgers, and I love them raw in my lunch box. As a snack to get me through the day, they are unparalleled—crunchy, juicy and sweet, but not so sweet that they give me a sugar crash. And homegrown carrots are a million times more flavourful than commercial carrots, so growing good carrots is important to me.

Unfortunately, I rarely have luck with my carrots. Last year, I planted three times and got, maybe six carrots. This year, after my first planting failed entirely, and my second mostly failed, I decided to get serious about carrots.

First, I evaluated why my carrots so often fail. It’s not just one problem that nails them. First, I probably plant my carrots a little too early. Not that they won’t grow at the cooler soil temperatures of early spring, but they take longer to germinate, leaving the seeds at risk of my other two problems: pests (mostly slugs and slaters) which eat the seeds and freshly germinated seedlings, and drying out.

Finally, even once my carrots germinate, they struggle with the heavy clay soil of my garden. If I lighten the soil by adding lots of compost, the slugs and slaters just eat the carrots before they can establish.

So, to try to address all these issues, I started by asking my husband to build me a raised bed. Into the bed we poured a commercial garden mix (half soil, half compost), combined with a sack of garden sand.

I watered the bed well before planting. Then I made my furrows deeper than necessary, so that even after covering the seed, the rows were lower than the surrounding soil. My hope was that the rows would stay moist longer after watering or rain if they were furrowed.

I watered well after planting, then generously sprinkled the bed with slug bait (I use Quash (iron EDTA), which is also very effective against slaters, but is safe for most everything else). Then I mulched between the rows with grass clippings, and covered the whole bed with feed sacks laid right on the surface.

With the feed sacks on the surface, I didn’t need to water daily, but I watered every other day (with extra waterings on hot days).

Ten days later, I have excellent germination on my carrots!

Was my raised bed necessary? Maybe not, but by making the bed, I focused my effort on a smaller area than I usually plant in carrots. It gave me an excuse to work really hard in that small area to make it work.

Will it work again next year? I’ve had bumper carrot crops in the past, so I know that success one year doesn’t necessarily mean success every year. But I’m hopeful that I’ve hit on a technique that works consistently for me. Only time will tell.

In the meantime, I’m doing my best to keep my newly sprouted carrot seedlings moist and free of pests. I can taste the carrots already…

(Finally) Going Solar

October 24, 2025 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

When my husband and I designed our current house, we did it with solar power in mind. The house faces north, the roof pitch is steep for better solar gain, and we had it pre-wired for solar.

Five years later, we’ve finally had the panels installed. And while I’ve been itching to have it done for years, I’m glad we waited.

Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, the biggest impact we could make for ourselves and the environment was to get an electric car. So that purchase came first. We love the Leaf we bought, and it costs us about a quarter of what we were spending on petrol. Those fuel savings helped us save up for solar.

Additionally, the technology has both improved and gotten cheaper over the past five years, so what we are able to afford today is much better than what we could have gotten when we built the house. I’m sure if we waited another five years, we’d see more technological improvements.

But with so many people switching to electric cars these days, New Zealand’s electricity suppliers are more frequently firing up the coal and gas generators as our current renewables production falls behind consumption. So I’m thrilled to have our own solar array, for our own benefit, and for the benefit of the planet.

Spectacular Spiders: Sooty Orbweaver

October 16, 2025 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love spiders. One of my favourite story books as a child was Be Nice to Spiders by Margaret Bloy Graham (never mind the subtle misogyny in this 1967 publication). Growing up, we called the big hairy jumping spiders in the basement “friend ‘pider”.

When I was bitten as a teen by a large wolf spider who’d taken up residence in one of my sneakers, my main concerns were: was the spider okay? (Yes, she appeared unharmed by me squishing my foot into ‘her’ shoe), and was wolf spider venom strong enough to do anything to humans? I was fascinated to find that, yes, my pinky toe, near the site of the bite, was paralysed for about fifteen minutes. Cool, right?

Having lived in Panama, a place with spectacular spiders, the relatively small and harmless New Zealand spider fauna was initially disappointing. But Aotearoa has some fun and quirky spiders. And though none of them rival the tarantulas and golden silk spiders in Panama, New Zealand wins the prize for the sheer volume of spiders. They seem to inhabit every nook and cranny here.

I’ve recently started a wee project to document the spiders on our property. Last Friday, I spent my morning tea break photographing a few.

One of the more common spiders I found on my stroll was the sooty orbweaver (Salsa fuliginata). Despite the name, these dainty arachnids are beautiful creatures, and quite variable in appearance. The three individuals in these photos were hanging out within 50 centimetres of one another—one brown, one rosy, and one yellow-hued. I always find them among the broad beans, capitalising on the heavy insect traffic around the aromatic blossoms.

The sooty orbweaver is native to Australia, and likely arrived in New Zealand from there around 2000.

A Fresh Perspective on a Changing Garden

September 29, 2025 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

blooming daffodils in formal garden beds

Twice a year, on (or near) the equinoxes, I clean the gutters. It’s not a job I enjoy, but it’s a necessary evil living downwind of the neighbour’s huge pines, macrocarpas, and gum trees.

The one thing I do enjoy about the job is the excuse to spend a few hours up the ladder, peering down at the yard from a perspective I don’t normally have.

So last weekend when I was cleaning gutters, I took my phone with me and snapped a few pictures from on high.

The last time I photographed the garden from this perspective was in September 2022. At that time, we’d just finished establishing and gravelling the paths in the front yard. Look what a difference three years makes! And what a fun perspective from which to view it.