Time for an update!

It's Winter here at CTF, and we've had a few frosts, but some lovely fine days too. Fortunately not too cold being at the Northern end of NZ. We don't get snow here, it's usually just wet, with a cold southerly wind or else fine and sunny during the day but frosty at night.

I've been out pruning our many fruit trees, some of the bigger ones have needed quite a bit of work and that's very time consuming. I've been fairly brutal to them poor things but they did really need to be 'minimised' - we don't want huge fruit trees with inaccessible fruit for one thing! While we may not get such a great crop this next season, I'm hoping the following one will be good.

The pigs are growing fast. They've already eaten all of the root fodder we grew for them in their paddock (mainly mangels and sugar beet). And they've eaten just about all of our pumpkin harvest too - although I was loathed to feed them one of the only Musque du Provence pumpkins that grew in the drought - have kept this for a few winter soups for us!

They're now guzzling their way through lots of milk, crab apples and the odd handful of pig pellets.

In the vege garden, while things have slowed down over Winter, we're still managing to harvest a few greens for the dinner table.

The broccoli has been performing well, we've eaten quite a lot already with more yet to harvest. Apart from the standard green heading, I've put in some purple sprouting as well.

The cauliflowers are doing quite well. I planted purple ones this year for a splash of colour -

Also in the garden lots of spinach, silverbeet and herbs - coriander and parsley. I have found the odd chilli out there too which is amazing! Hope your garden is producing well over the Winter months.