Initially, I bought three packets of onion seeds and two packets of overwintering onions that were planted in the fall together with the garlic. But two of three seeds did not germinate at all and the germination rate of the third one was abysmal. I bought further two packets of seeds and those had high germination rates, but they were still tiny and I was not very confident they would grow much. Thus I ordered several further sets of onions. It was difficult to estimate how much to order since they are sold by weight, not by number. I decided to go for four onion sets and one shallot set á 250 g.

To make it quick and easy to plant them in my favorite triangle pattern, I made a thingamajig to mark six holes at once. First I used it to scratch three parallel divots in the soil and then I poked in and wriggled it about a bit to mark the holes.

It worked like a charm, I was planting onions like no bee’s knees. I planted all the onions in a 10×10 cm pattern, and the shallots in 20×20 cm pattern.

I also continued to pick stones that got in the way while planting. Even after working on this soil for over half a century, sometimes even sieving portions of it, I still reliably got half a bucket full of stones.

And here you can see the pile of stones behind my garden shed, with the broken bathroom sink for size comparison. All this is from picking stones from the vegetable patches over the last year. Last summer, I used up almost all the stones on this pile to repair my walkway. Now it looks like I did not touch it and it is likely to continue growing until the next time I find a use for them.

With the onions firmly planted in the ground, I lightly brushed the soil over them with a broom. Onions are not supposed to be planted deep so this should suffice.

There still may come late frost but I decided to plant the onion seedlings too since they were getting in the way and on my nerves. I overcrowded those since I will not be trying to grow them into big bulbs – if they survive, they will probably be used mostly green.

I delineated my onion patches with willow twigs and watered them thoroughly. As you can see, they take up a lot of space. Twice as much as I wanted them to in fact. The sets contained a lot of tiny onions, and as can be seen in the picture, one variety even contained a lot more than the other three (ca 30% more) despite them all having the same weight. If they all survive and grow, I could end up with more onions than I can reasonably need and I will have to try to trade some for something else or force them upon unsuspecting family members and friends.

I also planted green peas using the same thingamajig. It too worked like a charm and  I am very glad I made it. It makes the work so much quicker that it saved me the hour and a bit I spent making it several times over. I will probably make another one with 15 sm spacing for crops that need slightly more space.

The peas will need support so I cut a bunch of approx. 80 cm long willow twigs and put them in a sunny place to dry up. I do not need to poke them in the ground near the peas before they poke out of the ground. It is better to let the stakes dry out as much as possible before using them, otherwise they take root.

And yesterday I started harvesting radishes. From now on for about a week, these will be daily condiments accompanying our dinners. They are delicious and once I am done with them, I will tell you how much (in kg) I got from one packet of seeds.

I’ve never grown carrots. We do not really have the soil for it – it is heavy clay with lots of stones.  We also have a lot of wireworms around here and they do a lot of damage to everything underground. And we have wild carrots and related plants in the surrounding meadows and thus we also have carrot flies. My father tried to grow them once, without success. This year, I decided to give it a try and grow a few. And I did several things to maximize my chances of success.

The first was that I deep-plowed my main vegetable patch, as I said before. And I continued to take stones out of the soil on that patch, which, even after decades of doing so, still produces several buckets every spring (I got three this year again already). If I did not know better, I would have thought that stones grow from the soil and not the other way around. But still, this huge vegetable patch is most definitively the least stony area of my garden.

As the second thing I decided to not sow the seeds directly into the ground but in small seeding trays made from paper egg packages. My father removed the bottoms and filled them with substrate. I wetted the substrate to compress it a little.

After that I let the seeds germinate on a wet paper towel in a receptacle under a lid. Carrots have a relatively poor germination rate directly in soil and they have to be thinned afterwards. The process of thinning allegedly attracts carrot flies and I wanted to avoid that. Today I carefully picked germinated seeds with a BBQ skewer and I placed one of them into each receptacle in the egg trays. I planted 228 seeds this way (12 trays á 10 and 6 trays á 18).

I planted the whole trays in the center of the vegetable patches. That way they will be as far from the surrounding grass as possible, which should shield them a bit from both carrot flies and wireworms.

And lastly, for today, I thoroughly watered the planted trays. We shall see if it is a success and they at least poke out of the ground. I have no idea how long it should now take for something green to show up. The only thing I can do now is to water them and wait.

Tomorrow I will start planting onions around these trays. Those should allegedly further repel pests and they also allegedly should not compete much with the carrots. I will probably stop the onion planting about 20 cm from these trays anyway so the carrots have an adequate amount of light.

Like every odd-numbered year, I did not buy seeding potatoes. I merely planted leftover potatoes from last year – those that were too small and too green to be edible. They were not as tiny this year as they were in 2023  so I might be getting slightly better results. Hopefully. I planted all three varieties that I was growing last year and this winter we did find some interesting things about them.

First, let’s talk about dehydrating potatoes for long-term storage.

From left to right are the varieties Dali, Esme, and Marabel. As you can see,  two of the three varieties tend to discolor to dark brown, sometimes almost black, when being dehydrated raw. We tried several things we found on the internet – blanching, washing them with water, washing them with vinegar – and none really helped. It is a purely cosmetic thing which does not bother me at all, especially not when used for making potato mushroom soup which turns dark brown from the mushrooms anyway. But since the Dali looks really nice, they could be potentially rehydrated and made into other foods – purree, cakes, etc, where the dark color might be off-putting. So we decided to dehydrate predominantly the Dali and we used the other two for immediate consumption and for making dumplings that can be frozen for later use.

Another interesting thing we found out this winter by accident was actually really surprising. Last year I wrote that the Marabel potatoes sprouted first from the ground and thus were most damaged by late frost. But they seem to be the most resistant to sprouting in the cellar – they remained fresh and unsprouted right until the end of winter when we ate the last of them. And even now when I was planting them, they had barely visible eyes whereas both Dali and Esme had long, leggy sprouts all over them.

I originally planned to bury them in the compost but I changed my plans and decided to try to grow spinach in that place instead, so I had to repeat my experiment from 2023, only without the planting patch being properly prepared over winter. I simply put the potatoes on the lawn in rows of 10 and then put both old and fresh moss and grass clippings between the rows, doing my best to not damage the long sprouts on Esme and Dali (in the picture are Marabel).

I put a little soil on top of the rows to cover the potatoes. After they sprout out of the soil I will put more moss, grass clippings, and soil in the rows again to cover them even more. Overall I made three patches circa 3×3 m, each with 80 potatoes. I will probably have to add some highly diluted mineral fertilizer into the water for these patches in order for them to have an adequate amount of nitrogen since there was not enough grass and way too much moss.

It was a whole day of work and I hope it will pay off. I have no reason to think it won’t. I won’t get as much per potato as I would if I buried them in the compost but I hope to get at least 40 kg of potatoes from each patch even so. We shall see how that turns out.  Right now we have enough dehydrated potatoes (circa 50 glasses) for making soups for a year and maybe more. The freezer contains enough potato dumplings for several months too, so we do not actually need to buy potatoes possibly until the harvest. Except if we want to eat french fries, for which these varieties are not suitable anyway.

There is again a dead animal under the fold at the end of the article, although this time I am not to be blamed for its death.

The spring officially begun and hopefully, this is the last time we switch from astronomical time to summer time. I hope that decision lasts and I won’t have to deal with that nonsense for the rest of my life. Another sign of real spring beginning is that the narcissi started to blossom. I cut a few for my mother and put them in a vase like every year.

Warmer weather spurned me to start working on the strawberries. The raised strawberry bed needed a major overhaul. You have seen it before. For an ideal harvest, I would just pick off some of the excessive plants but that was not possible – the bed was starting to collapse in on itself and the strawberries had nowhere to grow. One reason for that was a loss of organic material due to decomposition – I used substrate rich in organic material to fill the bed originally and that has lost a lot of volume over the years. The second reason was rodents, who dug up holes under the bricks and caused them to tilt inwards. So I dug out all the material and I put some aluminum slabs under the bricks to keep them steady even if a mouse digs under them.

I filled the raised bed with fresh substrate, containing less organic material and more natural soil from my garden. Then I planted back an adequate amount of strawberries and I still had a full bucket left over. With that, I started a new circa 1×4 m bed near my greenhouse and I planted about 12 plants near each of the three freshly planted fruit trees. That way I will have an incentive to water them and I should get some use out of that piece of land even before the fruit trees start to actually bear fruit. In my typical fashion, I forgot to take pictures of any of that.

Just as I was finishing, the weather forecast that the Antarctic vortex is sending cold air our way and the temperatures will plunge below freezing again for two days. So I watered the beds and I covered them with reed stalks to insulate them. Two days of dark will not harm the plants, they will certainly do less harm than frost would.

Here you see on the left the stump of my late apple tree. The stump might sprout, but it also might be completely dead. We shall see. The huge bird’s nest in the middle is the mound made from moss in which I planted two blueberry plants and on which strawberries propagated spontaneously. I only thinned out those strawberries and covered them with reedstalks too. On the right is then the raised strawberry bed and the first stages of my sewage cleaning facility.

I divided my small field into seven vegetable patches by digging ca 25 cm trenches as walkways between them. The patch adjacent to the greenhouse is the one that I planted with strawberries and then too covered with reeds.

Theoretically, I did not need to dig the trenches this deep but I prefer to do it. I get slightly deeper beds that way and need to bend slightly less when working on them afterward and I am not needlessly compacting good fertile soil with my heavy boots. It took me a whole day since my back was not entirely fine and I also had to do more work. As you can see, on the right the trenches go apparently into the lawn. That is not the case, it is the other way around – the lawn grass is encroaching onto the vegetable patches. That was always a problem, therefore about ten years ago I delineated the vegetable patches with concrete grit paving stones. They are completely hidden by the grass and they cannot stop it from going into the beds, but they do provide a hard boundary to which I can work back. Which I could not do with the plow, unfortunately. I had to do that manually, with a pitchfork and spade and a lot of elbow grease. Now all the beds are clean and delineated, I only need to wait until the frost spell is over and I can break up the lumps with an electric hoe and flatten them. After that I can start planting – I will start with onions and carrots and in whatever space is left I will plant beans and peas.

When digging the grass out of the patches, I found this fellow underground. I did not kill it, but I did not put any effort into saving it either. It is technically a pest but they never emerged in my garden in numbers big enough for me to notice them at all. Although there is occasional news about them emerging en masse in warmer regions and decimating fruit trees. With global warming, this could potentially happen here too, I guess. It is something to watch out for as the weather gets warmer. I also found two or three of their grubs but I did not take pictures of those.

And lastly again one dead animal. It is not all pink and cozy in the garden.

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