Saturday, September 25, 2010

The Circle is 1 year old!



On Saturday, 25th September we celebrated the first anniversary of the birth of the Woodwind Circle Community Gardens. A special birthday cake was made in honour of the occasion!



























Sunday, September 12, 2010

Cape Town's Mayor visits us

We were pleasantly surprised by a fleeting visit from the Mayor and Mr Morkel during the week. With newspaper reporters in tow, they quickly visited the gardens, had their photos taken, and left. Pity we didn't get a chance to talk or give him a proper guided tour (which we're getting quite good at, considering all the foreign visitors we've had over the past months). We would have loved to pull and present him with some fresh carrots or a lovely lettuce from the food garden. Oh well, maybe next time...


The flowers are in bloom everywhere. The lavender is looking particulary beautiful at the moment, and so are all the gazanias which were planted to hide the tyres a year ago. I think they've done a spendid job, don't you?



Spring is here!


We've enjoyed tasting kohlrabi for the first time, and we were pleasantly surprised at the delicious taste. We had them stuffed and baked... yum!

















The seed beds are being sowed with the summer crops' seeds every 3 weeks in rotation. There are 3 of them, so hopefully they'll keep all the other beds well stocked.

Carrots are doing really well now, and it's so exciting to pull them and see how huge they are. It's important that we have at least 2 rows of carrots in each bed at all times, to ensure a steady harvest.

The peas on the tripod frame are ready for picking and we included some in a butterbean curry last week, which was really tasty.















We've planted herbs in tyres in every available spot. There are also four 1-metre square potato patches, a pumpkin patch, strawberries patch and 2 hills for squashes and melons. This is the first time we're growing all of these!







The fennel has been a great hit! Not that anyone around here (besides us) eats it, but because they such hardy plants and seem to tolerate all types of weather too! We made the most delicious fennel risotto, which we've been bragging about to all our friends, gladly pulling some fennel for them and passing on the recipe to try. We enjoy the risotto so much, we laughingly said last week that we're going to make it every week!

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Garden gets a Spring Clean


The caretaker, Jeffrey takes pride in keeping the gardens looking great! The old winter growth has been removed to make room for the new shoots of Spring.