It’s almost time to make an overview of the 2014 veggie garden, like I did of the 2013 veggie garden. But before I dig into my old image files, a last update from the winter garden. It’s also the first update of the 2015 garden actually. I decided this weekend to work in the veggie garden as per usual for next year, although we don’t know how long we will be enjoying the garden next year. I first thought we would just leave it as is, and not bother with growing food in it, as we might have to leave it half way, but this week my hands started itching again.

I will most probably regret not cultivating the garden, if we end up staying here over the summer. And the worst thing that can happen if we move during he growth season, is that we leave behind a flourishing garden for the people that come to live here after us. Well and if that’s the biggest disaster that hangs over our heads, then the choice is easy.

I had to make this decision this weekend as all the leaves had fallen down from the trees all over the garden over the last few weeks, and I knew that I our gardner would soon drive up to collect all the leaves. He always waits till the last leaves fall and then he collects everything at once, without a timely warning. I don’t know what he does with the leaves, but this year I wanted to collect them first, and use them as a warm blanket for our veggie garden. Unfortunately the gardner called a day too early, late in the evening, and he announced that he would arrive one day later to pick up all the leaves, early in the morning. Hm. Decision making time. That pitch-dark evening marked the beginning of our 2015 vegetable garden. We decided to go out with a torch and collect huge bags with leaves. Kind of crazy. I wonder what our neighbours thought we were doing.

autumn garden12

autumn garden01

autumn garden06

Today we took the second step. We dug up 1/3 of the garden and took out most of the weeds. We covered it with our home made compost and part of the leaves we collected from the bottom part of our garden. And this is how it looks now. You can see the difference with the part that we didn’t do today on the picture above. It looks really beautiful, I can’t wait till we cover the whole garden with a leaf blanket and clean up the rest of last years ‘mess’. The color contrast works so wonderful with the remaining plants. You can see some of the artichokes, asparagus, red kale, beetroot, strawberries, fennel and red bitter escarole. Look at all these colours. Let’s never skip autumn and winter!

autumn garden04

autumn garden08

leaves blanket vegetable garden

autumn garden03

autumn garden07

autumn garden10

autumn garden09

autumn garden11