#vegetable garden
Summer garden getting into full swing!
Here’s some hardy roses, greens clipped for lunch, our hugelkultur mounds with perennial berries and herbs, a ground cover of radishes and rye that I pull up and use as green manure (it’s been coming back for a few years, anywhere I drop the seeds), squash vines (on a hugel mound) with a cattle panel set up for a trellis, and tractor tire raised bed full of tomatoes.
Finally, what I’m hoping will be a snake habitat to control pests. It’s set into a hugel mound that the rodents made nests and tunnels in, there’s a water dish nearby and the bricks and rocks catch the sun and warm up. I’ll let the grass around it grow long to create cover. Strawberries grow on top.
July 16/17, 2017
Post link
This is an “after” shot of a front strip, raised bed vegetable garden my crew and I worked on this week. The people who own this home have 5 kids and they’re all excited about the new garden. We planted tomatoes, peppers, arugula, beans, cucumbers (I still need to come back with trellises, and supports), Rainbow Swiss chard, basil, cilantro, lavender, mint, Walla Walla onions, marigolds, raspberry (container shrubs), strawberries, and corn (not pictured, it’s on the driveway strip adjacent to this one.)
I love the way this came out, I hope it gets huge. It was a somewhat sad dirt patch before, with just a few drought tolerant flowers around the tree. We added a bunch more flowers, pink ice plant, around the tree. I love my job.
Post link
April: our new vegetable garden and babysit dog
Our first community garden, introducing you to a new friend, and taking you along to some beautiful spring views!
How does your garden grow… ?
Lower Fort Garry,
St. Andrews, MB. Canada.
~Coast to Coast~Shades of Black & White~Abstractions~
Post link
Book Review: The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food
Book Review: The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food
If you’re new to gardening, starting a garden can be quite intimidating. The learning curve can seem steep and the barriers to enty can feel vast. Having a beautiful, productive garden like those you might see around your neighborhood can seem like an unreachable goal. What isn’t obvious when encountering nice gardens are the mistakes made, the lessons learned, and the years of trial and error…
via mom’s garden
April 7, 2021
Things are growing
March 11, 2021
Many things in the garden made it through the winter.
Garden update - First Swiss chard harvest!
Have you ever planted Swiss chards? I absolutely adore this vegetable! ❤️ Swiss chard is not a well known plant, but I think it’s amazing. It grows super fast, it’s very undemanding and if you are lucky it can survive during the winter! Well I guess not everywhere, but my patch of Swiss chards did survived this year, I live in Hungary and we had some snow and minus degrees during last winter… (The red ones are new, I planted them back in March. The white ones are the survivors from last year.)
I can’t wait to cook something from it. I love to make simple omelettes from them but now I will maybe try out something more special. I don’t know yet..
Post link
Got some garden work done this week!
The violas, strawberries, and parsley all survived the winter and look pretty damn good.
The chamomile re-seeded itself EVERYWHERE, so a lot of time was spent either pulling, composting, or transplanting it. I let one of last year’s kale plants flower (mild winter = kale kept growing, is only now bolting) so hopefully I’ll have some seeds soon.
Planted early crops of romaine lettuce, butter lettuce, and spinach earlier in the year. The past few weeks they’ve been growing like champs and are ENORMOUS and delicious.
This week I transplanted seedlings to the main garden and container garden. Main has beefsteak tomatoes, vine cucumbers, and bell peppers. Containers have cherry tomatoes, bush cucumbers, and various herbs/greens.
New this year are onions and carrots!
This is a demonstration of how drip irrigation works. It’s not overly exciting. It drips very slow, but that’s what makes it so great. The slow dripping prevents water being wasted through runoff because the water has time to soak into the soil. Drip irrigation is super efficient and will help you save water. It’s much more efficient than a soaker hose or a sprinkler system.
Spring flowers at the allotment
Since I’ve been behind, so, so behind with sharing photos of my plot, here’s a collection of spring flowers, with more to come as they couldn’t all fit in a post.
I will be writing more specifically about some of the plants I’ve grown, but for the moment I still have some work to do as I might have entered the plot into a local gardening contest to be judged soon…stay tuned!
Post link
How I recruited a small army of ladybugs
In my last post, a reblog from last year, I mentioned the cut conifers to be sold as Christmas trees had started arriving at the garden centre where I work, but together with the trees we also received some visitors.
As of October, ladybugs (Coccinella septempunctata) begin congregating in sheltered places to spend their winter dormancy period, a time when their mobility and activity level are strictly dependant on the temperature, and it seems a large number of them had chosen the dense, evergreen foliage of the Nordmann firs (Abies nordmanniana) to do so. Whenever I would free a tree from its net, shaking it, several ladybugs (as well as a variety of spiders) would fall to the floor, suddenly thrown out of their cosy temporary home.
I collected and placed dozens of them around the garden centre, where they will be valuable allies in my battle against aphids next year, but I also decided to relocate some of them to my allotment. I had one of those boxes sold as “butterfly houses” installed on a south-facing portion of the fence, and I thought it could serve well for the purpose of giving them shelter, so I filled it with some bamboo sticks and placed them inside to see what they would do.
They seem to find it suitable, the following day the box was still full and the majority had climbed up to rest under the roof. If all goes well, they will spend the winter there, and when they emerge they will find the place to be a good breeding site, which will also, inexorably, be filled with food for them.
Aphids, mites and all of you, soft-bodied insects, cower before my army now!
Post link
Got another garbage onion started, this time a sweet yellow onion. Looking at all the divisions in the center, it may send up shoots from multiple places meaning I can divide it and get more than one onion out of the deal. We’ll see!
For those who mentioned having trouble getting this to work, you do have to change the water daily. Not just add more, but pull the onion out of the dish, dump out the water, rinse out the dish, and put new water in (and obviously put back the onion). Other than that and temperature control (don’t let it bake in the sun or freeze in a draft), just leave it alone and it should sprout.
Post link
My garbage onion (I grew it from the root end of a store bought onion, something that normally goes in the garbage) finally sent up a shoot! And look at all those gorgeous roots!
I also had some sprouting store-bought garlic (you can see it on the counter behind the onion) so I decided to put those in some dirt as well. So one onion, five cloves of garlic.
I’ll probably sprout another onion bottom after dinner, since I have a couple of yellow onions that need to be eaten and my little sprouting dish is now empty.
Post link
Finally getting my seeds started! Since I live in an apartment with no balcony or patio this will all be a 100% indoor garden. Never done this before, so we’ll see how it goes!
I’ve got:
▪rainbow mix carrots,
▪red Russian kale
▪salad bowl lettuce
▪Bloomsdale spinach
▪Oregon spring tomatoes
▪red cherry tomatoes
▪habanero peppers
▪sweet basil
▪Greek oregano
All are heirloom seeds.
Now, this seed starter tray is really nice. I’ve seen a few different versions, but I went with this one (years ago) because the company offered refill pellets so you can reuse the plastic tray and clear greenhouse lid (not pictured).
I will say that these little pellet refills also work well when put in eggshells for those who like to use their old eggshells as seed starter containers. They have biodegradable mesh around them that allows them to more or less keep their shape in case they’re too tall for the eggshell.
To use, just soak them for about 10 minutes or until they’ve expanded, then sink a single seed in the center of each one.
Post link
Turning these plastic creamer bottles into pots for the seeds I’m going to start soon. They fit perfectly on my window sills which means I can put them in every window and not have to buy shelves.
I’m not going to put drainage holes in the bottom because I don’t want to deal with water damage from overflowing saucers. Instead I’m going to put an inch or two of gravel in the bottom, top it with cardboard or newspaper, and then add my soil.
Post link
I put the root end of a store bought white onion I ate into some water and it’s growing quite nicely; plenty of new roots and an obvious swelling in the center on top. Once it starts turning green I’ll put it in a pot.
Never grown onions before. This will be a fun experiment.
Post link
Made a spaghetti squash yesterday and decided to save the seeds. Whether I decide to try and sprout them or toast them and eat them is still up for grabs.
Maybe I’ll sprout a few and eat the rest…
Post link
