I am not a happy camper right now. Of all the soy beans that I have sown, none emerged. I dug up a part of one row, and I found a few badly damaged and dead seeds; the rest has completely rotted away already. Either the seed batch was bad, or the weather was too cold. I am inclined to suspect the latter, because we had abnormally odd weather – it was sunny, dry, and very cold until about three days ago, when it suddenly became very hot. We had a change in temperatures 12°C within a week.

I removed the rubber and PVC mats that I put on my lawn in order to kill it. They fulfilled that role perfectly, and although it was very compacted clay, with the roots being dead and partly decomposed, it was comparatively easy to till it with a garden fork and flatten it with an electric hoe. Whilst doing so, I dug out two vole nests, with stashed-away potatoes and grass. I was expecting the voles – they would do the same thing under thick snow cover, only it would be more difficult to see in living grass.

I sown it with white bush beans. And I put aside five beans to check the germination rate. Two sprouted, three rotted away. I am really pissed. I hope that at least enough of them sprout out of the ground and ripen in order for me to get my own seeds for the future. I do not know what it is with leguminous seeds these last two years. If you remember, I had the same problem last year with pole beans. Speaking of which…

Last year, I had barely enough white runner beans to put aside fifty seeds for sowing. Luckily enough, they had 100% germination rate.

I changed the trelis behind the house to 26 poles spaced circa 40 cm. To each, I planted two plants. There is a 27th place too (not in the picture). That is occupied with a frost-hardy seedless grape that I bought this year. I was worried that it died, but it started to grow this week and looks healthy (albeit tiny).

The green peas on the large leguminous patch are growing well, and they had a nearly 100% germination rate, too. Today, they even started to bloom.

Alfalfa is still tiny, and for some reason, it is spotty – there are areas where it did not germinate at all, and there are areas where a lot of the seeds germinated.

Yellow peas should be the most advanced by this time, yet due to the abnormally cold weather, they barely emerged from the ground, and the germination rate is also nothing to write home about. At least the germination rate was hopefully good enough for the crop to improve the soil, even if not to harvest enough peas for food.  I do wonder what the hell is going on with legumes.

I ordered some more white bush beans and a new batch of soybeans. Unfortunately, the soybeans very probably won’t manage to ripen when I sow them this late, but I will try it anyway. Maybe I will get lucky, and frost does not come before late October – it can happen.

The oats look promising so far. It is lush, dark green, and almost knee-high. I do hope this continues.

The bamboo survived the replanting in December. Most of the stalks above ground died off, but there are new shoots emerging from the ground, and they are pencil-thick. That is a good sign that I might finally get some bamboo growth – the soil is now not compacted, and I added a significant amount of eggshells to elevate the pH a bit.

I did a lot more other work too, but this post is long already, so I will finish with a picture of my new compost thermometer. I decided to buy one, because I almost forgot and lost my digital thermometer in the pile, not to mention that it was too short and hard to read. I spent two days mowing 2 thirds of my garden. I mixed the grass with old brown grass and leaves at approximately a 1:1 ratio, and the next day, the pile was almost hot enough to cook an egg. I still have not found the time to mow the last third of my garden, and in the meantime, the first two-thirds are getting covered with new growth already. There is enough time in the day to manage all the work that needs to be done, but alas, there is not enough strength in Charly. Currently, I am doing my best to keep on top of the work without injuring myself or getting completely exhausted.