While this piece of soil looks nice and clean, a big part of the veggie garden is a big mess. It’s only fair to show the mess to you, as I’m beginning to clean it up, so that you know how I started out this year.
But first I would like to show you some of my seedlings. I need to re-pot some tomato plants again. But as you can see, they grow vividly in egg shells. The amount of soil in the egg shells is not enough though to grow them bigger. I’ll now repot the seedling and crush the shell while doing so. The second seedling that you can see below is an artichoke. I was late with sowing that one, but I wanted to try anyway. It seems to grow perfectly. Hopefully it will give us a first artichoke this year. On the third image you can see how my biggest tomato plants are going along. Nice, right?
So we’ve been working in the garden a bit. It’s not a total mess. I’ll start by showing you parts that we have been working in first. First our greenhouse. I dug all the weed out yesterday and made a little walking path.
I’ll grow a few watermelons, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and aubergines in there. I hope to be able to place some of them in there later this week. It’s quite warm in there already. As most of you in Europe know, the weather is strange this year, and these temperatures are exceptionally warm. So I think I can try to grow a few early tomatoes. But first I’m going to let the soil warm up and add some compost today.
The front part of the veggie garden is also almost done when it comes to removing the weeds. When that’s done, I’ll remake the beds again and place the stones around them neatly. Unfortunately a lot of weeds grew in between the stones, so I had to rearrange them. This part is fairly ok. Especially if you compare it to the back and side part of the garden. Let’s slowly move towards that side.
Ghum! We’ve come to the part of the garden that still needs a lot of work. One of the problem parts is the side part of the garden. Grasses have taken over. I don’t have a clue how to get rid of all these weeds effectively. We actually didn’t take everything out last year and we are punished for that this year. They came back. Bigger and better. It’s annoying, since I would like to grow carrots on that side (it’s quite sandy there) and as they are an early crop, I would need to sow them now. Unfortunately the weeds are in the way!
I’ve also sowed out new peas again and they are now about 15-20 cm long. The long bed on which the peas are sown is a bed that we are trying to lift. Last year it suddenly flooded in the middle of summer and it flushed away parts of the garden. We hope that by making this piece higher (with compost, old branches, stones and plain soil) we will prevent this from happening this year. It’s a lot of hard work though. I’m happy that Eduard is helping me with that. In the end we will grow pumpkins, corn and beans on this side. In the traditional way, all together. But before they are placed outside I’ll grow some plants there the upcoming months that can fertilise the soil a bit more. Like peas.
It’s fun walking around in the garden right now, since you can find a lot of seeds lying around waiting to fall down and grow again. I need to collect those before they fall onto unintended placed. You can also find a lot of regrowth in the garden. Swiss Chard is coming up again, but also fennel and some other things, like the Chinese cabbage just started to bloom.
That was the march messy veggie garden update. Just outside the vegetable patch we have piled up a few branches from the apple tree. I’m using the small branches to make small fires and the big ones I’ll use to carve spoons and things. I’m waiting for my tools to arrive this week and I’ll show you more about that then soon.
We also bought a water barrel. It’s huge and we are planning to catch water from our rooftop and from the roof of the green house (I need to buy a smaller barrel for that one). As the year is probably going to be extremely warm, we will need a lot of water to water the garden. We hope that it will rain once every two weeks like last year during summer, so that we can collect the water and save money, but also save the environment a bit. At the same time I’m a bit afraid though that it will never rain again. That would be quite a tragedy. So it probably will rain ;)
Other parts of our garden are also waking up for spring. You can see that the magnolia tree has started to blooming. Some precious days are coming up, until it drops all it’s leafs again.
That’s it, I’ll update again as soon as all the weeds are gone from the veggie patch.
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