…well, deep in the heart of Texas actually. Oh to be in Austin, tomorrow, for the Garden Bloggers Spring Fling. Now, folks, if you´re within striking distance of this event, get your good self down there. You haven´t got a ticket? Don´t worry. Just tell them Lynsey sent you. I find the best approach is just cruise up, smile, give out cards, and get on with it. They were expecting you to crash the place anyway.

It´ll be life changing for you. Go to the conference now. Don´t wait, hesitate, or procrastinate.

I’m working away, in the spare moments (yes, both of them), on building a vegetable garden. It’s been something of a laborious process as I’ve winched myself up the learning curve. I wish my Dad was here, he would’ve knocked it together in an afternoon - he of the ‘I built my own pig sty, cow shed, hay shed, etc etc etc’ fame. Me - I’ve managed to do a deal to get some recycled fence palings, and some pegs, and I’m nailing the palings, paint side in, to form the space for our vege garden. Secretly, I’m quite enjoying the experience. I’ve spent quite a long time working out how to get a workable potager, to cover the land space usefully, to use the palings with the least number of cuts, and generally make it a worthy effort. I’ve painted the palings with used/recycled engine oil to act as a further preservative - the pine has slurped in the oil like a sponge and left a beautiful dark brown finish. Photos as they come to hand. I hope to get the job done in the not too distant future so I can get the late autumn/winter crops in. As we made dinner Marica and I were encouraging ourselves with - ‘This is the last year we buy garlic’ and ‘I can’t wait until we have our own tomatoes/fresh herbs etc’.

The Tea Garden property doesn’t have a regular/rectangular shape and the hedges are somewhat disrupted as well. Unfortunately former owners have attempted to use some conifer - I think it is the Lawson Cypress (Cupressus/ Chamaecyparis lawsoniana) for hedging. It’s not suitable for a suburban garden, my opinion. It’s trying to be a tree - up to 50 metres tall. Great. The former owners have also hacked into the trees trying to top them and ‘bonsai’ them into a hedge. The lower branches have died off and/or become clogged with the leaf litter from above. It’s a complete mess. I want them gone, and fortunately one of my work colleagues has an urge for firewood. And does he have a deal for me? Would I be interested in swapping paving slabs and recycled bricks for firewood? How many nano-seconds to make that decision?

Meanwhile I still want hedging to keep privacy and security, and to preserve some sort of more natural looking landscape. My solution is to work with what is there already - in some places enough light has got in and native shrubs that will reach about 2-3 metres have begun to grow. I’m cutting back more of the dead branches, and adding lawn cuttings around the base to encourage the growth. There are some great thing about using the natives - they can be cut back happily and will form a hedge with a diverse foliage sheen, shape, colour, and texture. They’ll also provide feeding opportunities for the native birds - the tea garden is about 1km from the wildlife refuge as the Kaka (Nestor meridionalis septentriona) flies - I frequently hear the native parrots while I’m working outside. The shrubs will continue to self-seed, and so replacement hedging will continue to come through.

To add some further interest to the native hedging I have collected some ’sweepings’ from a forest floor - I’m hoping the leaf litter will be full of seeds just busting to join in the celebration. I’ve set up four seed trays with a compost base, added the leaf litter, and then topped it off with a layer of compost. I gave the mix a good watering - the litter was very dry - and have laid sheets of glass over the trays to keep the blackbirds out. So far, so good.

As I trimmed back the overgrown hedging along the back of the property I discovered what I thought was concrete edging was in fact a path, the best part of a metre wide! The path has once marked a generous edge to the boundary, and by opening it up, in winter we’ll be able to walk around the tea garden in any weather.

Having just returned from Austin, Texas I can thoroughly endorse the hospitality of the people of Austin. True, we did get into trouble, regularly, by taking photos, but hey - we’re tourists, that’s our job!

And now it’s your turn - a bunch (now there’s a good gardening term that also sounds appropriately Texan) of Austin garden writers have collaborated to create the Garden Bloggers Spring Fling 2008 Saturday, April 5, 2008. Sadly, I am unlikely to be able to make it - we only got back from Austin in December - but you’ll kick yourself if you don’t get there. My previous experience with BlogTalk Downunder, which lead to us organising and running Blog Hui in 2006 has demonstrated how, in ways unexpected and quite unprecedented, attending and participating in blog events can be literally life changing. If you are, in any way, able to attend, do yourself a favor - get along.

An unexpected joy has been finding an iris managed to survive the rain and winds of spring, growing in a pot. We love iris - the embodiment of the rainbow.

Today was also my Dad’s birthday. When the odd flower (Dad loved odd flowers) appears, or the tui calls, or especially if I hear a shining cuckoo calling I miss my father.

The roar of spring hasn’t started just yet, however I did take the opportunity of the sunshine to mow the lawn at the Tea Garden this morning. There are bulbs popping up everywhere, not just the ones I planted, and some are beginning to flower. The camellias are opening, and a rhododendron is floating clouds of faintly pink and white blossoms - looking great against today’s blue sky. And of course, the lawn is beginning to grow; and even the goldfish surfaced to catch some of the warming rays - their water is freezing - I don’t know how they manage. I managed to trim back the plum tree a little a few weekends ago, and the tiny green buds are starting to appear along the charcoal coloured branches.

The slight rustling of of Spring is here. Not a moment too soon as far as I’m concerned, I hate the cold weather.

When we moved into the Tea Garden I was surprised by the lack of blackbirds. Our last place had blackbirds a-plenty, but here, in what I would’ve thought was an ideal suburban environment - hedges, lawns, shrubs - so, where are the bids?

Well, to my ‘joy’, the birds have arrived and have commenced doing their famous scratch in the garden routine. In amongst my carefully planted, mulched, fertilised, and bark covered spring bulbs. The bulbs are beginning to come away, and suddenly the birds decide to scratch them out, and heave the bark over the footpaths. I’m trying to remain charitable…

We had our first light dusting of frost yesterday here at the Tea Garden, and to celebrate the frost, and Matariki ( a few days back - on the 16th this year), I remembered apple snow. I’d never made it before, but I can remember the delights of it from when I was a kid - I think (I bet) it was one of my Dad’s favorites. A quick phone call to Mum and yes, I’d pretty much guessed right - and here is an ancient family recipe for perhaps the easiest dessert.

Peel some apples. I’d allow about two apples per person. It’d be great to have superb cooking apples, I used some slightly scanky green delicious (apparently organic) that were on their way to having seen better days. They were flavorsome nevertheless. Chop the apples into chunks just to help speed the cooking process. I added a sprinkle of cinnamon, slightly less of nutmeg, and a teaspoon of vanilla sugar. You could add some powdered cloves, or whole cloves (remove once the apple is cooked), and/or a vanilla bean. Whatever you like. I added the sugar really for the the vanilla, my plan was to taste the apple once cooked to decide how much sugar was needed. None, as it turned out.

Add a little water to the pot, and simmer the apples until soft enough to mash - about 20 minutes. I added too much water, I’d misjudged how much apple juice would come out during cooking. Once the apple was cooked I drained off most of the liquid. Hm-mmm - hot spicy apple juice. I poured the apple pulp back into the pot, and did the initial mash with a potato masher. You could probably do the whole deal by mashing and sieving the apple, but I didn’t want to spend the time - I used a wand blender and whipped the pulp into a fine puree. The pulp was a golden colour, once I started to whip air into it, it became paler.

I folded a scoop (maybe two) of vanilla ice cream through the puree. I then took the white of an egg and beat it until it was very stiff - peaks formed on top, and folded that through. The trick is to lift the air through the puree, and capture it with the smooth creamy texture. The warmth of the apple expands the air trapped in the egg white, and you end up with a soft, smooth textured, delicious dessert. You can serve the dessert hot, warm, or chill it - personally, I like it hot to warm. Simple, elegant, nutritious - what more could you want from a dessert? Give it a try.

According to A History of the Garden in New Zealand,

Wartime had also encouraged home food production. The Press of 5 October 1939 carried a report about a meeting conducted in Christchurch the previous evening by the Canterbury Horticultural Society to promote the production of vegetables in home gardens: ‘Home gardeners could materially assist in the nation’s war effort, said the Mayor (Mr R. M. Macfarlane, MP), who presided.’ The following year, women in the city organised to grow vegetables for institutions such as orphanages that might otherwise go short. They grew their crops at home, and in a half-acre plot they ploughed up at Abberly Park in suburban St Albans. Women’s involvement with gardening of all kinds no doubt became much more pronounced during the war years. Nancy M Taylor suggests in The Home Front, however, that domestic gardening fell off with the onset of war because of mobilisation, overtime and the Home Guard’.

It was not until the middle of 1943 that the Government initiated a ‘Dig for Victor’ campaign along the lines of the British one. Wellington’s Evening Post carried this advertisement on 15 September of that year: ‘Make every yard of ground yield. Beg, buy or borrow a spade and Dig for Victory. That section of yours must not be idle. You will need a garden. A garden will feed you. Grow vegetables that will keep your family fit. Give them a balanced diet and greens the whole year round. Help yourself and help your country. Listen to any North Island YA and ZB station every Thursday night for practical instruction.’ In a similar vein, the introductory article in the first issue of the New Zealand Gardener, published in September 1944, notes that in wartime ‘the raising of foodstuffs overshadows every other branch of horticulture’.

Paul Walker, Towards the Modern Garden. In A History of the Garden in New Zealand, Matthew Bradbury, ed. 1995. Penguin Books, Auckland, New Zealand.

Click to play flash video 4.77 mb, duration 2:08 minutes

I interviewed John Quirk at his home on 19 May, 2007. John remembers how he and a group of his fellow students developed land at Wellington College in 1940. John and his mates were boarders, and is possible the headmaster simply found something for the boys to do. John noted after the interview that some of the boys had to use crowbars to loosen the ’soil’ as part of the development - the tools can be seen in the photo. John left the school before he got to see any of the fruits of his labour. He took the photo of his school chums, that’s his shadow in the foreground.