I owe you a first mid May garden update I realise! The last couple of weeks I’ve been meaning to post pictures, but then every day something new happens in the garden and I postpone the update till I have a full update. That day will never come the upcoming months, so I guess I just give you an update as it is. It’s a huge update anyway.

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Come on in! First thing that is clearly different from last months update is that we have put up all the supports for the tomatoes and the beans. I went slightly overboard with the colours I used as yarn for the beans, but I decided that I wasn’t going to knit anything in pink probably, so I might as well use it to brighten up the garden. 

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I find it interesting to see what a difference one month makes if you compare pictures. When you walk into your garden on a daily basis, you can’t see how fast everything grows, but when you put pictures next to each other, you suddenly see that many things have changed. 

The other big thing that has happened these last weeks, is that we took out our watering system again and placed it in the garden again. The weather is warming up again, we are reaching +30 degrees celsius temperatures these days and hand watering isn’t doing it anymore. We also finally installed one of the rain water barrels in the veggie garden. It is supposed to catch water from the roof of the green house. It’s a very DIY setup, but as this is probably the last summer that we are living here, we didn’t want to invest a lot of time and effort in something more permanent. I like it anyway though.

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rain water barrel green house

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And how about the veggies? Everything is growing vividly. It’s kind of absurd. We have had a few full meals already from our own garden, even with guests. Mostly peas, broad beans, garlics, salads and radishes. The summer veggies are just starting to grow. The first fifty real tomatoes are showing on the eighty or so tomato plants. It’s a real feast to see how we made such a progress in growing things earlier than last year. It’s the weather that’s making it easier, but it’s also keeping on top of things and using the unheated green house.

In the greenhouse we also can see an aubergine coming up, mini courgettes, sweet paprika’s and more tomatoes. If I compare it with my garden update of exactly a year ago, we are clearly far ahead of things. 

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Everything looks actually more like last years june update, where you can also see that I used these collar cabbages for the first time then. This year we are also growing two varieties of artichokes. I have green ones and red ones. I’m hoping to have some kind of harvest from them as they are artichokes that should produce a crop in the first year, but I’m not sure if it will happen. We’ll see. 

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garden may unheated greenhouse

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All the fruit trees and bushes in and around the garden are growing well as well. We have harvested a few full cups of strawberries already as well. Yesterday we ate our first cherries and soon we’ll have figs. For the moments that we aren’t working, we have put up our hammock again. Life is good #onthemountain .

We need to do a few more things in the garden though as soon as we are up to it. I need to finish the tomato and bean supports. We need to mulch the whole garden with straw and I’m working on a second sowing round now for the moment that the first crops our out and new ones have to go in. All is well though. 

How are your veggies doing?

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