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We’re back on air tonight at 7pm on Prime TV for the second half of the series. In episode 6, I teach Chris and Lee-anne how to pretty up their vege patch with a few flowers (some edible, some beneficial, and some just for their good looks). Plus Heather cooks up a storm with chef Peter Chaplin – they make a vegetarian tofu and cashew nut salad with loads of edible flowers – and Fiona is up to her eyeballs in roses.

If a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, how much is a bird in a bush worth? In my garden, the answer’s 11.

Sometime between Christmas and New Year, one of my two featherball Silkie hens (nicknamed Sage and Onion) went broody and made a nest for herself under, appropriately, the silk tree (Albizia julibrissin) at the far end of our lawn. She’s now sitting on 11 eggs.

At first I thought Onion was just a bit dopey. She’d never even met a rooster, so there was no hope that any of the eggs would hatch.

Or so I thought. But Sage (pictured) has now started crowing. A lot. I suspect he/she has a lot to crow about, having deviously avoided detection by pretending to be a girl for the past six months. But the wattle and comb are a dead giveaway now.

I couldn’t be a prouder parent. I love the idea of a whole flock of fluffy-headed Silkies running around on my wedding day. But what an unexpected dilemma it has caused. The far corner of my previously perfect lawn is starting to die off. Why? Because we’ve had to shift the irrigation sprinkler nozzle to stop it spraying the blimmin’ broody chicken.

The hundreds of the sunflowers I sowed at the far end of our new lawn are now cheerfully blooming on cue. Unfortunately, they’ve also turned their backs on me. When you sow sunflowers, it’s important to keep in mind that they follow the sun from east to west (plant them along your eastern boundary and they’ll spend the whole day perving on your neighbours instead of grinning at you). But here’s something else I’ve learned: if you have a huge old oak tree near your sunflowers that blocks the midday sun for an hour, then your sunflowers will turn their heads half-way, then stop, and stay facing east all day. So I’m going to try a classic Kiwi No. 8 wire sort of solution. I’m going to twist their necks and wire their heads so they can’t help but face west. Here’s hoping it works.

It’s a weird thing, trying to time a garden to look spiffing just for one day. I’m starting to feel like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, muttering “off with their heads” every time I find a flower bud that has deigned to show its face early.

I’ve taken to daily patrols of the flower border in front of the stables, armed with a pair of secateurs, to snip off any open blooms. It feels like sabotage. But deadheading is hardly a chore when the spin off is an endless supply of free fresh flowers to fill up the vases.

All my dahlias, especially the delicious ‘Raspberry Ripple’ (pictured above), with its burgundy-splashed petals,  are going great guns. I’m a little nervous that they’ve peaked too soon. Here’s hoping the half bag of Nitrophoska Blue I dumped at their feet today will keep them in good spirits for another six weeks.

Lawns are so last century. They’re unsustainable (especially in Kiwi summers), they waste vast quantities of water (tch tch), they require mowing (noise pollution), feeding (nitrogen run off) and weeding (naughty, nasty herbicides). I haven’t had a lawn for at least a decade (in fact, now that I think of it I haven’t had one since 1997). In my last three gardens, the lawn was always the first thing to go. Not just because I’ve never owned a lawnmower, but because I’ve always looked at lawns as simply hogging space where plants could go instead.
But oh boy, do I have a lawn now! And, even if I do say so myself, it’s quite magnificent. I’m like a proud parent… every day I’m out there patting its head and quietly congratulating myself that I have attained that vision of verdant loveliness that blokes everywhere lust after: the perfect lawn. The dog loves it. The cats love it. And I love it. (I realise it defies logic to love a lawn, but I do.)
Two days before Christmas, we rolled out 380 square metres of instant ‘California Green’ from Readylawn. It’s a deep green, wide bladed fescue grass that’s rhizotomous (meaning it creeps like kikuyu). It looked a bit ropey for the first few days, but two tanks of water later… it’s looking superb. And we’ve still got six weeks to go until the wedding.
Mind you, it’s just as well the lawn is in top nick, because as you can probably tell from the photo, the wildflower borders around the lawn are still knee high to a grasshopper. I predict a fair bit of panic buying of potted colour lies ahead.

Surprising side effects of pregnancy #1: Ornamental alliums are one of my all-time favourite flowers. I’ve loved these sculptural blooming onions ever since my first trip to the Chelsea Flower Show in 1998, when they were the flower du jour. They starred in almost every show garden that year. I remember writing a column about how they must have been the hottest new trend in floral fashion… only to subsequently discover that the reason these beautiful bulbs appeared in so many Chelsea gardens was because a canny nurseryman had offered the designers as many free bulbs as they liked. And, as it turned out, they all liked them quite a lot thanks!
Despite my fascination with ornamental alliums, I’ve only actually planted them twice. The first time was the year after I first went to Chelsea, when I planted Allium giganteum around my rotary clothesline. Bad move: this species has flower stalks up to 2m tall. No sooner had they started blooming than the washing line swung around and decapitated the lot.
I figured I’d give them another go this year and planted about two dozen bulbs (pink ‘Mars’, pictured, and white ‘Mount Everest’) from Garden Post. They have been utterly spectacular, which makes it all the  more ridiculous that the sight of them is literally making me sick. Yep, you guessed it: since I found out I was pregnant, I haven’t been able to abide the smell of onions. Cooked onions, raw onions – and gorgeous ornamental onions. I have to hold my breath to walk past them in the garden without gagging. Bugger!

There really is no better sight than a man on a digger, doing a year’s worth of hard spade slog in a single afternoon. (Single green-thumbed ladies: I highly recommend you start hanging out at new subdivisions, building sites, roading developments and anywhere else earthworks are required. A man who can operate heavy machinery, especially while dressed in a reflectorised vest that’s fashionably colour-coordinated with his excavator, is very useful indeed.) 
This is where our new lawn is going. It will be a formal, slightly sunken lawn edged with a low wall of recycled kerbing stones (the Hunk brought them home from work too) and it’s going to look magnificent surrounded by a meadow of wildflowers. That’s if it ever stops raining for long enough for me to spray the old grass off around the edges so I can start sowing. Is there any such thing as a pagan sun-dance?

I woke up this morning to the gorgeous gargle of a tui getting liquored up in the ornamental cherry tree by our front door. It almost made up for the miserable weather, again. I love watching tui. They’re so hedonistic. Faced with a tree in full blossom, they behave worse than adolescents on alcopops, especially if you’ve got an early Taiwanese cherrry, Prunus campanulata. They drink themselves silly on its fluoro-pink blossoms; don’t be surprised to find them blotto on their backs, having fallen out of the branches.
Our tree’s a pale pink Japanese cherry but that doesn’t mean the tui are any more refined at our place. By the time I came downstairs and grabbed my camera to snap this photo, a second tui had arrived on the scene. Instead of sharing, the two birds immediately launched into a lout bout of beak-and-claw biffo. Tui are beautiful songbirds, but they’re also big bullies.

Child labour: it’s not all about sneaker factories in third world countries. My mother forced me to shell peas. Thousands of fresh peas, from thousands of pods. I did it under duress.
As a kid, I hated peas. On one occasion, I was told by my parents thatI couldn’t leave the table during a family dinner at my Aunt’s house until I’d eaten my peas. It was a battle of wills. I lost. But I sure showed them. I showed them all what semi-digested peas look like when power chucked back up.
Mum always grew climbing peas, staked with criss-crossed bracken fern sticks cut from the roadside. These days compact peas, such as Greenfeast and dwarf Earlicrop Massey, are more widely grown than that lanky old-timers like Alderman Tall. Sugar snaps or snow peas, those tender types eaten pod ‘n’ all, are even more popular, though even they need a shoulder to lean on.
Stuck for space? Train Progress or Rondo up trellis or wire netting fences, or rig up marvellously rustic tepees from manuka poles, trussed together with twine like a game of cat’s cradle.
Sow peas now. They do best in the cool days of spring. Come summer, powdery mildew hobbles the vines. Sow seeds directly where you want them to grow, unless your garden is frequented by felines, blackbirds, slugs or snails. Cats show no respect for freshly cultivated soil – when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go – and birds will scratch the seeds out as soon as they sprout. Slugs and snails just scoff the lot. Sow peas in trays first if need be.
My tastes have changed since I was a toddler. I now eat piles of freshly podded peas in spring, boiled briefly then drizzled with butter.  If I’m feeling flash, I’ll make like I’m on Masterchef and serve spring lamb on a verdant smear of minty pea puree. Finely chop half a small onion and sauté in a tablespoon of melted butter. Add a 500g packet of minted frozen peas and 100ml of hot chicken or vegetable stock. Simmer for a few minutes, till the peas are soft, then add a big handful of torn fresh mint leaves. Pour into a blender or food processor and puree until smooth. Season with sea salt and serve.  It’s the posh way to eat frozen peas while you wait for your own crop.

Self Sufficiently Lynda is published each week in Sunday magazine, in the Sunday Star-Times.

In the best tradition of the ugly duckling turning into a swan… here is what my new garden looks like right now. Mud. There’s lots of mud… and not a lot else, apart from a strip of white fencing tape to roughly mark out where my new formal sunken lawn will be. Yep, that’s the formal lawn I’ll be standing on in a big fat wedding frock in February. Begs the question really: does anyone make bridal-themed gumboots?

(And, in case you’re wondering, the blue diagram in the foreground is an attempt by the Hunk from Hunua to teach me how to work out the right angles required to result in a lawn that was square with the boundary fence. Confused? I was. I had to retire indoors for a glass of wine and a lie-down.)