City folks in the garden

It’s going to be a full post today, but I’ve been quiet for a week, so that’s ok right? It’s not a post about this whole week, but mostly about today actually. Summer has kicked in – in spring – so we have been quite active outside our house and I therefore would like to show you how much progress we have made in our garden – or potager as the french would say.

But before I do that let me show you these cute flowers that have been growing in our garden. About a week and a half ago our gardner called Eduard that he was going to come by to cut our grass because it needed some trimming. The day before I had just told Eduard that I hoped that the gardner wouldn’t come by any time soon, since our whole grass field was filled with these cute little flowers. Didn’t work – he called the day after about an half hour before he entered our garden asking us if we could open the gate for him. So when Eduard mailed me with the news, I didn’t open the gate, but ran out to “save” the flowers first. I wasn’t sure if they were going to survive inside, but it was worth the try, otherwise they would end up under the trimming machine anyway. I managed to do this right on time and opened the gate for the nice gardner. He must have been surprised to see an empty flowerless field ;-) But I was content, it even brightened me up a bit that afternoon. These flowers have been in our house now for almost two weeks and they look still this pretty. I’m amazed, sometimes you buy flowers that are meant to keep inside your house and they die on you within a week, these guys on the other hand are apparently grow outside, but prefer the indoors ;).

Our sprouts on the other hand have left the indoors this week, since the weather forecast is very promising and some of the sprouts really needed to be planted in the permanent bed as well. Besides that there is of course such a thing as external pressure in the form of seing all your neighbors in the village work on their gardens, so you need to as well. It’s called integrating. ;)

So I decided to make some garden signs made out of ice cream popstickles first. It was going to be a great DIY tutorial where I explained how to burn letters into wood with old lead letters. It was a great idea, but it failed, you can find the results below. I decided to share it anyway since the internet is full with great DIY, but misses out on those great failed tutorials. On to Plan B! Plan B was going back to basic and just writing out the signs – and learning some french while I was at it. Which looks nice as well, but won’t result into a tutorial as you can understand ;).

With the little signs on hand we went up again to our potager to dig out another garden bed and to plant some of the seedlings. Today we planted the onions, carrots, some of the tomat0’s and peppers and the beans. Tomorrow I’ll do a second round with things that I will plant immediately in the soil. It’s really a hassle to sprout things first and then put them in the ground, especially when you don’t have to (or when it’s better not to). So that was another learning moment. The garden is now again far from finished, but it’s looking better don’t you think?

It’s pretty dry outside already and it’s not going to improve seing the weather forecast, so we have to find a watering schedule that will be proficient enough to keep everything growing. Two things on our to do list now: 1. buy a XXXL water hose and 2. find a way to collect water that falls down when it rains so we can use it when it’s a more dry period. This second part is tricky, since we live in a rented house, so we can’t really mold the house to our means, but who knows maybe we can come up with something. I’ll keep you posted on this.

So that’s our Saturday so far, I’m writing this post while we are sitting in our porch drinking fresh abricot sirup and eating a pain with chevre. At the same time our orchard started to bloom this week. So life is good, the goods definitely balance out the bads.

What we did find out today though is that we could be definitely described as city folks, the picture below of Eduards hand – that shows the result of the shoveling in the garden – is a proof of that. Let’s see how this evolves over two years. I’ll keep you updated on that as well.