Posted by shiny on December 20, 2025 at 00:00 and edited at September 20, 2026 at 10:37

By November the garden stopped being a promise and started being an actual source of food again.

Strawberry wine ambitions

I saw a strawberry wine idea online somewhere and decided it was now a mission. It went straight onto the to-do list alongside dress rehearsals and concerts: harvest barley, buy strawberries, make strawberry wine, walk the dog, clean the kitchen, make scotch broth, build yet another potato bed, and dig a vege bed for beans and peas. Somewhere in there I also cut a bird out of the strawberry netting — the same one that had been stealing berries for weeks.

By late November I was casually rounding up the day's strawberry harvest, and turning grass clippings into a hot compost ferment on the side — 60°, cooking down fast, compost ready in about a week.

Money, and where it actually goes

Early November gave a pretty concrete answer to "why bother growing your own food": that week's spend was $100 on meat from the Seatoun butcher, $36 on milled flour, milk, and eggs from the Shelly Bay baker, and only $27 at an actual supermarket — soy milk, yeast, margarine, baking paper. The week before that, $150 for 5kg of unroasted coffee beans. The garden isn't the whole food budget, but it's doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The sneaky harvest

By December 10th I couldn't resist a sneaky early dig of the Christmas potatoes. They were looking good — good enough that by December 18th, the bucket was, for the first time ever, too heavy to lift. Same bed size as every year. Just a better year.

By Boxing Day the verdict was in: potato chips are a genuinely good way to preserve a potato harvest, and the "cheap food phase" of the year — where even non-gardeners can spot sudden abundance at the supermarket — was kicking in too.

Wine, meanwhile, was still going: the apple cider was glugging away for Christmas, and after a full ferment I was adding finings to drop the yeast gunk to the bottom overnight, ready to bottle.

Next up: the tomatoes arrive, and don't stop.

Photos: strawberry harvest (Nov 26), sneaky Christmas potato dig (Dec 10), the Christmas spud that broke the bucket (Dec 18), wine before/after finings (Dec 4).