Hello everyone. Zak here from a sunny Cape Town, South Africa.

I started work yesterday and the silly season is finally over. With all the visitors and Christmas, then New Years, then the event at Sword and Board I have not been doing MUCH in the garden.

Some basic upkeep stuff. Watering. Feeding with fertilizer. The pumpkin plant needed a place to grow to so I have provided it with that.

I cannot dedicate a massive amount of work in the garden at a time. Instead in the mornings and in the afternoons I spend a few minutes doing something in the garden. I guess I can only do little bits of work but often this is all that needs to be done: little bits of work that turn into a lot of work because it is that same work repeated over and over.

Deweeding and snipping the buds off the basil plants is one of those tasks. As long as I do a little bit every day, it is a manageable task!

So let's look at the other bits of work!

Pumpkin work

I have no idea if I will get any real pumpkins out of this whole project. Right now I am just learning. I have started doing things that people have recommended to me that I try. Putting a pallet down in one area to lift all the pumpkins up. Putting a trellis up so the leaves and stalk can go UP.

In one section the stalk is also going through the fence, so I will weave it into the fence.

There is one section at the top left that started going out of the box, I then put a trellis there. Bottom left it is doing the same thing so I will need to stick another trellis in there as well.

Peek-a-boo! The pumpkin wants to go for a walk in the garden! This will not do since it will just get destroyed.

Here is where the stalk went through the fence and I have put it back through again, careful not to bend the stalk. Hopefully, it will get a grip here and carry on growing!

This is the pallet area. There are some pumkins in this area that are keeping dry (unlike the ones in the grow box. I think that if I knew this in the beginning that I would have put a grid over the soil in that box. Nothing else can grow alongside the pumpkin after all. Look at all those leaves!

An extra pallet was added this morning to make sure it stays off the ground.

Here is the other side where I have brought the stalk back through the trellis. Hopefully that will keep going too!

Herb Garden

I tell you what. Counting my water by the litre has made me very conservative when it comes to watering. Right now my budget shows in a negative value because of what I estimate I will use throughout the month.

I will do my best to monitor it but in the end of the day am I going to fund my water needs on Hive then?

Perhaps I will need to, out of necessity!

Suckers!

No, I did not trick anyone. A sucker is a little bit of tree that grows out of a tree. Usually the nice tree that we see in suburbia needs to be maintained to be quite that shape. A lot of trees will become overgrown like a bush or thicket.

Below are plenty of those examples. I need to prune these off again. Not only does this smart-up the garden again but the suckers are added to the compost heap and becomes part of the nutrients that will go on to feed the whole garden!

Thank you for reading this post!

Cheers!
@zakludick

Hive South Africa