Abundance in the garden: the backyard grocery store
Our abundant garden, pineapple, leeks, spring onions, strawberry beds, greens, broccoli and numerous other edible plants visible in this picture
I love this time of year! Here on the Sunshine Coast, the sun shines brightly during the day, creating a wonderful 23 – 25 degrees C and then cooling down at night, which enables us to run the wood stove as well. Best of both worlds really!
The garden loves this time of year as well, green leafy vegetables are abundant, as are citrus and strawberries. Some pineapples are ripening, and the snow peas are ready to be picked.
Abundance in our top garden
The lovely thing about this time of year as well is the sound when you come into the garden. You see, we have an abundance of chinese greens in the garden (bok choy, pak choy etc), which we let go to flower and seed every year. We have not planted any chinese greens for years, and yet they appear in our garden abundantly every year, because they self sow. When they are in their flowering stage however, they attract some wonderful little friends: bees.
A number of bees pollinating the flowers of our chinese greens create a welcoming atmosphere in the garden.
We enjoy hearing the buzzing of these little insects, they are so busy pollinating, it is wonderful! There seems to be a respectful relationship between us in the garden, I work around them when I pick my vegetables, and they fly around me without landing on me (or stinging!). The bees are so precious and so endangered now, that we like to encourage any bee activity in the garden. The best way to do that is to let vegetables go to flower. The benefit of this is also that the plant then seeds off, and you can either let the seeds drop or harvest them and store them for next year’s planting.
We harvest what we need or that which will go rotten or go to waste if not harvested. Excess strawberries get frozen and any greens we do not use the chickens love and come back to us as part of their eggs.
Our harvest for today; we only pick what we will eat that day or if it needs to be picked so it doesn’t go to waste.
Several times a week I go into the garden and do my “shopping”. Salad greens and herbs, fruits, beans, peas and broccoli, spring onions, leeks… too much to mention. When I do my shopping, instead of being assaulted by fluorescent lighting and bad music, I enjoy the sounds of birds and bees and get my daily hard needed dose of sunshine. Yes, this is the life!
Mandarins, silverbeet, kale, Italian flat parsley, dandelion, society garlic, herb robert and more…
If you would like to learn how to create abundance, I recommend doing our Permaculture Design Certificate, followed by the 10 week Internship. We still have places available in our next PDC (starting 19 August) and Internship (starting 3 September), book now!
Author: Zaia Kendall
Zaia grew up in a family of musicians in Holland, and has a background in top sport (snow skiing) and web development and design. She co-founded the PRI Luganville and PRI Sunshine Coast Inc (now PermEco Inc.) with Tom, and runs the “invisible structures”, like finances, business administration, website design and maintenance, writes articles and records and edits videos. She assists Tom in running the Kendall Permaculture Farm and supervising other volunteers. She is an active member of several musical projects and bands, involved in community music and runs percussion and marimba workshops, is the percussion leader for the Woodford Folk Festival People’s Orchestra and composes as well as plays music. She is passionate about community music and loves seeing people discover that they can play!
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