Finally, the sun is shining, and it feels like summer and feels a lot more like Christmas.  Doing the gift shopping in the gloomy weather doesn’t feel right – although with the lower temperatures we had recently it meant the chocolate Santa’s didn’t melt in the car on the way home! 

My garden is pretty much ready to leave for the holidays.  There is more that could be done, but nothing so desperate that it won’t survive without me.  All that really needs to happen now is for me to keep harvesting, which is such a wonderful thing.  Filling the kitchen bench with more and more fresh produce each day is so exciting, until you realise you’ll be working into the evening with the processing, pickling and preparing to freeze so nothing is wasted.  But putting on a cheesy Christmas movie makes the time pass fast enough.  I will do a hard pick before we head away, catch tomatoes with the slightest blush so they ripen over time, and a skinny cucumber is better than an overripe one.

The Christmas menu will be skewed towards the produce from the garden and will feature freshly dug potatoes and freshly shelled peas – podded by all available hands as a bit of a tradition.  There will also be beetroot, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, onion, beans herbs and the last asparagus harvest.  It will be deliciously festive!

Now just to let you know, I’ll still be around in a lurking monitoring kind of way – to make sure we don’t run into any problems, or those ever so rude interlopers don’t come back, but I’ll also be on holiday mode so you may not notice I’m there. 

But this year we have been proactive and have set up next years page already.  You can have a sneaky peak if you go to the drop-down box and select 2023.  For now, any blog post will still be added to 2022, but hopefully, all going well at the stroke of midnight on New Year, the page will automatically switched over to 2023.  Historically, we have run into technical hitches at this point and this time we have done what we can to avoid any problems. 

However, it is technology and if you have ever shouted at a printer you know there is a slight chance things won’t go well.  If it does glitch, hold tight with your exciting updates as the team will be back in the office again on the 9^th so any problems can be fixed after then. 

We look forward to your continual updates in the new year and have enjoyed seeing you all continue beyond the Vegie Growing Challenge.  Feel free to share any garden updates of flowers, trees, nature and of course your vegie gardens and the recipes you make with your harvests. 

I just want to say a big thank you on behalf of Yates and myself to you all for your amazing support of this community, making it - in James’ words “…by far the friendliest place on the net.”

I hope you all have a Very Merry Christmas and a Safe and Happy New Year, and we look forward to seeing a lot more of your gardens in the future.

Happy gardening and as always – if you want to get in touch leave a comment below.

Sarah the Gardener  : o)