Water tank bursting rain is upon us for a few days. The temperatures have plummeted and the winds are wild enough to create sleep depriving booms under the veranda. However hard I tell myself that rain is a good thing for the land I can’t help feel deprived of... Being in the new Kitchen Garden with me is a whole new adventure for the bassets with enormous scope for mischief. I love their company but gardening with bassets is a futile exercise in command and control. There is rarely an offer of a helpful paw but rather an... Our new garden construction has been called many things. Vege Garden, allotment, Elizabethan Garden and potager. I’m pleased to announce it’s official name is the Domestic Executive Kitchen Garden. This is the third element of the Backyard Pantry... I’m sure you wouldn’t like it if you were dressed in shorts and sent outside without sun screen or a sweater on a summers day in Wellington. It would be both chilly around the knees and potential for sunstroke in a flash. My vegetable seedlings feel... Few things in life give greater pleasure to a basset than a pile of mud. A place to put their pudgy paws and indulge in a spot of sniffing or digging. The softer the mud the better it is but as mud goes they’ll pretty much take anything. With the... 