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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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Earthquakes in New Zealand

We’ve experienced quite a few earthquakes since arriving in Aotearoa New Zealand only 6 months ago! Some big, some small, some barely noticeable at all. One even made headlines all the way back in the Netherlands. Triggering heaps of messages to ask us if we’re alright. Well, yes, we are! I’ve been reading a bit about this fascinating subject since we first got shaken up. I thought I would write a post about it sharing some of the things I’ve learned. I’ll probably revisit this one in the future as there’s way more to earthquakes (in New Zealand and beyond)…

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Running New Zealand!

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post. I have heaps of inspiration and enough adventures to write about. However, I’m training to run a marathon (my second)! This means lots of running all over New Zealand. Add full-time work to this and that equals (very) limited spare time. Yesterday I’ve been on my longest training run – 34km that turned into 36km… This means today is a sitting/lying-down day: time to write! As there are only three weeks left until my marathon, I thought it would be nice to take you on some of my New Zealand…

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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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