It always surprises me that while we’re in the height of summer and enjoying blazing sunshine in the day, that come February the mornings are already so dark. I have the privilege of being woken before 6am most mornings by little voices and hands. In the last week I’ve noticed how much longer it takes for the sun to lighten the sky in the morning.

I’m getting so used to treating our garden like a supermarket, sometimes I forget how many failures we’ve had on our journey learning to grow our own food. There’s been so many hard lessons, we’ve had issues with soil quality, wind, pests, too much water, not enough water.

I’ve fallen in love with courgettes this season. Thankfully ours are growing well this year since we gave each plant a stake to climb. Last year we had several plants in our garden, but I feel like I wasted them. I’d regularly forget to go and check for fruit under the huge, spikey zucchini leaves.

Sustainable fabric grow bags are one of the easiest ways to create more growing space.

While our property has lots of space for us to turn into growing areas, it can be a bit of effort to set up new spaces. We experimented with planting rambling crops like potatoes, kūmara and pumpkins on a mulched bank but found that they struggled in poor quality clay soil that lacked nutrients and couldn’t hold moisture.