After a few more hours of shoveling compost yesterday, I'm happy to say that job has finally been ticked off. There's no more compost sitting on the tarp waiting to be moved! 

All four large vegetable gardens have been topped up, the huge dahlia/cottage flower bed out the front, the subtropical gardens that edge my raised veggie gardens, as well as various other smaller gardens along the paths. 

On Sunday, I also managed to pot up all of my dahlia tubers. I've got 17 tubers to go in. Snails seem to think our little yard is paradise so the reason I've potted them up first is to give them a bit of a head start. The snails seem a lot less interested once the plant has developed and I go through less snail pellets - win, win. 

I finally got around to sowing some more flower seeds over the weekend too. I find the amount of money I spend trying to fill up my large flower garden adds up so growing from seed makes sense. I also love being able to grow varieties that can't easily be found in the shops. 

Here's what I planted yesterday - Aurora Carnation, Rosetta Cosmos, Apricot Lemonade Cosmos, Vegmo Single Matricaria, Costa Apricot Snapdragon, Costa White Snapdragon, Chantilly Light Salmon Snapdragon, Costa Lavender Snapdragon, Oklahoma Salmon Zinnia, and Oklahoma Ivory Zinnia. 

You'll note there's quite a few Snapdragons as these are Luke's favourite. I always loved Snapdragons as a child too. The Rosetta Cosmos seeds I bought simply because my nana's name is Rosetta. These particular seeds were purchased from Emerden, which is a small flower farm located in Tikorangi. 

The rest of the day was spent doing lots of weeding and odd jobs around the garden. I feel like I've finally made some decent progress and can get onto the more 'fun jobs'. This week I'm going to finalise my summer garden plan for our four raised gardens, as well as help Luke get started on his school home garden projects. I've got a pretty good idea of where I want to plant everything, but I think it's time I put my ideas down onto paper. Luke has to do this for his home garden diary too so it's something we can sit down and do together. 

I hope you all had a productive weekend in the garden too. Apologies for being a bit quiet the past few days, but let's be honest - no one would have wanted to read a daily compost update haha. Onto more exciting things now! 

The photo is of our salad patch. I've also popped in some extra stawberry plants that we had leftover. A couple of Aspiring Raspberry plants will be popped in here too. The frame has previously worked really well for berries and the lettuces/greens seem to not bolt quite as fast in partial shade. One of the many jobs on the October 'to do list'. :)