Save the crossword or sudoku page of the newspaper and wrap up all your presents in that – hours of fun after they’ve opened their gift.

Give the gift of your time – offer to:

Do a day’s gardening

Cook a sumptuous organic meal

clean their house

mind their kids for a day

give a massage or give them a voucher for one

do odd jobs round their house for a day

take them on a picnic

Choose an assortment of our fair trade food – how about a basket with Palestinian olive oil (1st prize winner), any of our coffee (it’s all fair trade), some bars of chocolate from Kaoka or Rapunzel, a few chocolate hearts and a beautiful tea from Hampstead or Scarborough Fair.

Give them a gift that goes to people in need – many of the major charities now offer this option including Oxfam and Christian World Service.

Give your garden a gift – buy a bokashi bin and compost all your Christmas food waste.

WHAT ARE WE DOING FOR CHRISTMAS?

At Commonsense Organics we give 5% of the net takings in each of our stores to a cause that is helping to advance our values. Often these are environmental groups – in October it was spring planting time so we gave the money to Operation Green Thumb. They help to organise the community gardens in the region. In November we gave to Transition Towns – a community organisation that is discussing and supporting ways to live within our ecological footprint.

And we’re also committed to social sustainability. As December is Christmas we will be giving our 5% donation to the local foodbanks. And in January we will be supporting Women’s Refuge. We welcome your ideas for groups who could use an ‘out of the blue’ cheque for the good work they are doing.

And whatever you are doing over the summer break, have a good time and a good rest and thank you for being such helpful and appreciative customers.

COMMONSENSE GARDENING..... by Catherine Collins

Kia ora

We have waited all winter and finally things are warming up enough to start planting out in the garden, I have most of my veggies in now, with just tomatoes and zuccuni to go.

And ofcourse I can never stress how important it is to get a good layer of mulch on before the soil dries out, mulch helps to keep the soil alive and brimming with life. Some soils can be hard to deal with if you have too much clay or too much sand, but a good layer of the appropriate mulch will help to improve soil quality.

If you live in Eastbourne, Petone or Kapiti coast you will have sandy soil that can dry out in summer and any water is filtered out quickly. You can improve your sandy soil by adding large amounts of humus/compost either from your own compost or buy bags of it from Commonsense Organics. We have certified organic bags of compost and adding peat will help also, along with this you can add some top soil which has a good clay content that will release its nutrients when mixed in with the compost as sand alone is very mineral poor.

Adding a good layer of seaweed to the above mix will improve your sandy soil no end. You can take the no-dig option and layer all this over the top or dig it in but in the case of a sandy soil I would advise layering it as nature will insure the layers sink into the sand. I find the best place to collect seaweed is from the beach next to Bishop Park in Eastbourne after a good storm, there is a large garden of lettuce type seaweed just off the beach and plenty washes up there, and not just after a storm. If you’re up the coast Te Horo is a good place as the storm brings down leaf mould and detritus from the Otaki river.

If you collect coarse or thick seaweed, it will break down more quickly if you soak it or run it over with the mower just to break it up, any type of seaweed is good, some people like to wash it but I don’t, the salt content is not enough to harm your garden. And best of all it’s free.

If you live in the hills like me you will have clay soil which will be wet and heavy in winter, dry and hard as rock in the summer. Clay, unlike sand, has plenty of minerals and nutrients for the garden, but the clay is packed in so tightly that all the goodness is stuck in there and needs releasing.

To start correcting the balance, add a good layer of gypsum (1kg per square metre) and dig it in as best you can. As this sinks in repeat after a few days and use a fork to break up the clay to a depth of around 15cm. The best time to do this is about now when the clay is still a bit damp from winter and before it dries out for summer. Then your patch will be ready to add the same ingredients as for the above sandy soil, minus the clay of course, for clay soil you can add sand. Gypsum is better because it has a more neutral form of calcium, rather than lime that can result in your soil getting overly alkaline.

And if you live on the valley floor in the Hutt you will probably have lovely soil as this was a large market garden once upon a time, thankfully before the onslaught of the chemical age, so just keep it fed with compost and it will be hard to go wrong. The same is true of the river loam away from the coast in Kapiti.

It’s also time for many garden bugs to be breeding and the best way I have found of keeping the population down is a regular but weak spray of liquid fish, (this really works a treat on roses, never fails me) and a spray with the garden hose, both need to be regular as clockwork, I hose spray the plants every 2nd day and fish spray once a week, its better to be preventive rather than trying to kill off a massive population. All that fuss will pay off in the end, but it can take up to three years to really interrupt the breeding pattern of some pests so keep at it.

Happy gardening.

This newsletter is written by Marion Wood with named articles and ideas and input from staff.