‘Gardening Nun’ goes viral (on the big screen)

If you were part of the audi­ence at the Embassy theatre for the world premiere of Garden­ing with Soul dur­ing the Inter­na­tion­al Film Fest­iv­al you will have wit­nessed some­thing quite extraordin­ary. A stand­ing ova­tion for a 92 year-old Island Bay res­id­ent and a speech by the dimin­ut­ive woman, who star­ted by telling the clap­ping crowd, […]

Ask Wellington: spring gardening?

fresh spray


fresh spray
Ori­gin­ally uploaded by Philip Fier­linger
of turntable.com

Some­times we at the Wel­ling­tonista must admit that even we, strange though it may seem, do not know everything about our fine city (and in this case, its cli­mat­ic pecu­li­ar­it­ies). So peri­od­ic­ally we must call upon the mighty and eru­dite col­lect­ive wis­dom of our read­ers to fill in the gaps.

Many of you may have noticed the arrival of spring­time, if only to observe the mar­gin­ally warm­er tem­per­at­ures, a sus­tained breez­i­ness, and an increased rate of sneez­ing exper­i­enced between your front doors and that of your air-con­di­tioned work­places. But not all of you fall into this cat­egory, and it is of you in par­tic­u­lar we are enquir­ing today.

You see, some in the Wel­ling­tonista (and again, this may be a little shock­ing) live in the sub­urbs. And some of us actu­ally have areas of flat ground reserved for the grow­ing of things that can be eaten (it is true that some apart­ment-dwell­ers have a couple of ter­ra­cotta pots on their bal­conies for the same pur­pose – the fol­low­ing may apply to them too), called “veget­able gar­dens”.

And so the ques­tion we have for you today is: What should we be plant­ing in our “veget­able gar­dens” right now?

We sus­pect that pota­toes are good at the moment. But we won­der: what else is good, assum­ing that it’s both leg­al and tasty? If we were to get plant­ing this com­ing week, what’s best?

Answers, please, dear read­ers.

First Pohutukawa Flowers of 2005

As spot­ted on the 12th of Novem­ber in the grounds of the St Hilda’s Anglic­an Church, on the corner of The Parade and Hum­ber Streets in Island Bay. Any claims from any­one on an early flower­ing?