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Xander

Failures in a permaculture garden in New Zealand

Time to share some of the failures in my permaculture garden! This season I was overly optimistic that everything would work out according to plan. Of course, reality caught up with me… Gardening in general is quite notorious as being a failure-prone activity. Besides this, working with permaculture principles in your garden does not safeguard you against failures either. Rather it’s how you deal with them that might differ a little. Let me share with you what I mean by that. Failures?! It’s a relatively small garden, but holy smokes can it feel overwhelmingly big sometimes! Especially when the “weeds”…

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Plant Tags for free!*

When gardening one can never have enough plant tags! You lose some, give some away, the weather has a go at vanquishing a few. All kinds of ways your plant tag reserves can easily shrink. Yet, if you’re like me and you grow all kinds of plants all over the place you need heaps throughout the growing season. Nowadays more sustainable options are becoming available, like wooden or recycled plastic plant tags. But they usually come with a price tag, and still need to be produced somewhere using some kind of raw materials… Plenty of reasons to make your own…

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Where to buy garden seeds in New Zealand?

Alright! So you’ve done some observing and you’re keen to buy garden seeds and get growing! You could simply go to an online search engine and type: “buy garden seeds in New Zealand*”. You’d get a long list (and some ads!) of places to buy seeds from. Easy as. However, in this post I’d like to share some thoughts on why you should give this simple action some more thought. A little longer than the previous posts in the series on how to start an edible permaculture garden in New Zealand. I do hope that it’s of enough interest that…

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Observations from a permaculture garden in New Zealand

Welcome (back) to my blog series on how I start an edible permaculture garden in New Zealand. This post will focus on some of the observations I made around “my” plot in the community gardens. This is not a definitive guide on how to observe. Rather, I hope it serves as inspiration for some of the things you could observe in your own landscape. Remember, in no way can you go wrong with observing. The only thing is to do it. Try to do it regularly and frequently. It doesn’t have to be long. Maybe you can take a few…

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How to start a Permaculture garden in New Zealand?

How to start a Permaculture garden in New Zealand? This question has been on my mind long before we even moved to beautiful Aotearoa / New Zealand. Many permaculture dreams, wild hopes and crazy ideas grew abundantly in my head way before we had even set foot in NZ. When we did arrive, we had no seeds or plants. Access to land for a garden was non-existent. Yet the winter was coming to an end and I had heaps of motivation to get started. Follow along in this series of posts if you’re interested in how I started a permaculture…

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