We live on Pasadena Ave. here in Auckland, which amuses me to no end having just moved from California, and given that it is the tail end of summer, we are starting to get a decent amount of food stuffs out of the garden. The garden is a bit small and we split it with our neighbors, but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in productivity. I don’t think much has been grown here for a couple years, and that combined with the compost from two houses has led to some extremely rich soil.

We kept it simple with tomatoes, lettuce, spring onions, fennel, basil, beets, swiss chard, buckwheat, sunflowers, sugar pie pumpkins, and jalapenos. Everything minus the pumpkins and jalapenos are doing very well and we are eating heartily of the garden. I’m optimistic about the jalapenos just being slow growers, but the pumpkin has a bit of a mold on it so i’m not holding my breath, especially given the humid weather.

A weed away, A weed away, in the garden, the mighty garden…

And the best performer of all – Giant Sunflowers. They are roughly 3 meters tall (10 ft!). We are going to save some the seeds for next year in the hopes of growing even taller sunflowers. The world record is 9 meters so we have a way to go, but a man can dream,

Super tall sunflowers! This is a picture from 2 weeks ago; they are larger flowers now, but all droopy from the giant seed heads so they don’t look as cool.

The bees love our sunflowers and the buckwheat. They will be sad, just like me, in a week or two when the flowers are gone.