Posted by shiny on September 20, 2025 at 00:00 and edited at September 20, 2026 at 10:27

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Spring prep and last season's ferments

It's spring again, which means it's time to look back at what an entire year of "grow it, ferment it, preserve it" actually looked like — starting last August, when none of this year's harvest existed yet, just seedlings, hail, and a lot of hope.

Hail, heaters, and cold frames

Late winter wasn't gentle. I had plans to build and make things, but the weather said no—so much hail that I ended up rigging a small heater element just to keep the seedlings alive overnight. "Build cold frames" sat on the to-do list through most of October, right alongside sowing chillies and moving the rhubarb.

Sowing the bones of the season

By the end of August I was telling Wellington: if you've got a bit of land with sun, rain, and some wind shelter — plant greens. Lettuce, silverbeet, coriander, parsley. This is the unglamorous part of a harvest post — the part where nothing is ready yet, you're just putting seeds and hope into the ground and trusting September-you to keep it alive.

Still living off last year

Here's the thing nobody tells you about growing your own food: spring is when you're the poorest for it. By late October the jars of preserves from the previous season were running low, and the new garden wasn't producing yet. That's the gap this whole harvest story is about closing.

Meanwhile, last year's harvest was still finishing its second life:

  • The apple cider was bottled.
  • The apple jack was distilling.
  • Bread was rising, sticky pork was slow-cooking, seedlings were getting watered.
  • Next up: a batch of beer to ferment.

By late September I had wine on the go too — the first ferment of what would become a running theme all year: if it grows, it eventually ends up in a jar, a bottle, or a pot of sauce.

The plan, roughly

Early October looked like this, more or less verbatim from my own to-do list: sow chillies, roast coffee, cook lamb, finish a sock, build cold frames, build another garden bed, move the rhubarb, sow lettuce, and start the wine's second ferment. Nothing on that list is a harvest yet. All of it is what makes the harvest possible.

Next up: strawberries, barley, and the Christmas spud that finally got too heavy to lift.

Photos: wine fermenting, Sept 2025.