Where does the time go?  The official part of the Yates Spring Vegie Growing Challenge ends on Friday 8^th December 2023.  For the last 94 days we’ve been sharing the gardening love, with all our ups and downs.  I love the support you have all given each other when things haven’t gone so well and how you celebrate all the successes, no matter how small.  I am so proud of this community; you are all the loveliest people I’ve ever worked worth and make my job so easy.  Having said that you also make things really hard, because the Yates team have to choose the winners and to be honest I wish you could all win.

What happens next? The good news is you can carry on sharing updates from your garden and stay in contact with everyone.  Back in the day, when the challenge finished, the doors were shut and we were left cut off from our gardening friends, wondering how they got on.  These days the doors stay wide open but there is no expectation for you to continue posting updates, but we do love to see them, and I’ll still be here making sure things are ticking along smoothly and spammers get kicked out.  (The latest attempt to lure us into dragon gambling lingered a little longer than necessary as it highlighted a technical hitch and we had to get the IT team involved, but we are normally on to any problems as soon as they occur).  It will continue to be a safe place to hang out if you want to.  There may even be a random prize or seed packet given out, but no promises at this point.

After Friday, the Yates team will make the hard decisions and pick three main prize winners for the $1000 Give a Garden Gift Card and $300 worth of Yates products.   They will also decide who gets the Starting Out, Best Supporter and Wild Card prizes of $300 worth of Yates products each.  You have all put in so much effort it will take some serious deliberations to determine which prize goes where.  Once the decisions have been made someone from Yates will contact our winners and then I’ll load a ‘Prize Giving’ post and our winners names will be added to the hall of fame Previous Winners tab on the website.

In these last days, it is a great time to look back over all your previous posts and see just how far you’ve come.  It has been a long difficult season, but our gardens are now beginning to offer up the rewards of all our hard work.  And if you’ve been in the community longer than just this season, look back at the old posts and see what things were like last year or even in years gone by.  Looking back, I can see this time last year was not yet warm, but I was getting gherkins.  I don’t have any of those here yet.  Going further back it was almost hot at this time of year but I was still popping in seeds to fill barren gaps.

However, the end isn’t here yet… and so, this week’s lucky random winner of the weekly free packet of seeds is Jordy.  The seeds will be on their way to you very soon.

Keep posting your wonderful updates to increase your chances of being the very last lucky weekly winner!

I hope you all have a fabulous week in the garden and as always – if you want to get in touch leave a comment below.

Sarah the Gardener  : o)

Photo: my garden this morning felt very unsummery!