This morning, the compost pile was steaming slightly, and although my nose cannot detect it, it probably also smells of ammonia. It attracted some flies and one dung beetle, despite being completely dung-free.

I feel slightly sorry for the poor fellow searching for their shit-snack in vain.

The first potato plant poked out of the ground. That is slightly premature; frost is still possible. I am watching the weather forecast like a hawk every day.

The spinach is so far growing very, very slowly, and it does not look like much. Preliminarily, I am skeptical about this crop.

I started to harden off the basil by exposing it to direct sunlight for a few hours each day. So far, no plant has been burnt and they look healthy enough. Once the danger of frost is over, they go outside.

The first beans are emerging from the soil, too. We shall see how many will actually sprout. I sown a lot.

I did not have much luck with sweet corn these last two years. So far, I have just 25% germination rate this year. I really hope that more emerge from the ground, otherwise I will be pissed.

Clusters of shallots look promising.

And so do the onions.

Teensy tiny carrots have shown up in most, although not all, egg baskets.

And lastly, peas sprouted today, too. They are a good indicator of slug infestation; they are literal slug magnets. So far (knock on wood), the slugs have not shown up this year. I have seen only three, which I killed instantly. It is possible that it is due to the much colder and frostier winter and much sunnier and drier spring. Even so, I have spent the winter researching slug traps, and if they start to show up, I will try a few things.

I had a very busy week in the garden, although I had to push the pause button for two days due to rain. I repotted all bonsai trees that were urgent, and now I can spend a few days taking some new ones out of the nursery and perhaps start putting them into pots. And I spent a lot of time on other works too.

Firstly, I raked a lot of dead grass and tree leaves out of my coppice and around the wire fence. The result was a slightly bigger pile than the moss one I showed you last time. The raking almost led to a relapse of my back pain, but luckily, it seems that a day of rest in the warm has helped.

Having a huge pile of dead grass and leaves has inspired me to do something that I normally do not do – hot composting. I had to do my first mowing of the lawn anyway, and that always results in a huge pile of green grass clippings.

I normally do not bother with hot composting; I only do slow composting. I dump all organic material throughout the year in one designated spot in the garden, and maybe once a year, I turn it, and then I leave it be until I need it. With grass clippings, it is important to let them dry first, otherwise the pile ferments anaerobically and too quickly and starts to stink mightily. That is why I rarely use the collecting basket on my lawn mower. This time, I did use it and I mixed the fresh, wet clippings with the old leaves and dry grass atop the moss pile. It increased its height twice, and its volume probably three-four times.

That is a big pile, but it still was not enough to use all the grass. The first reason why I do not bother with hot composting is that I usually have just too much green grass and never enough browns. For reference, it took me 5 hours of continuous mowing to cut most, not all, of my garden. I walked about 18000 steps whilst doing it, which is probably more than 10 km (I have long steps).

 

So after I started my experimental “hot” pile, I simply dumped the rest of the freshly cut grass on another spot. Since I did not let it dry first this time, it might ferment, but I am not that bothered by the smell. Depending on the weather, I will probably get the same amount of grass several times over during the summer. Which is the second reason why I do not bother with hot composting – I have enough work to keep up with the grass alone. Turning the compost pile over to aerate it would just add a lot of work, and I simply do not want to bother with that. I am only doing it this time because I hope to get compost more quickly to hill up the potatoes when they sprout. It does not need to be perfect for that; it just needs to not be stringy and matted, and it must be decomposed enough to not be hot anymore. That is a lesson that I learned the hard way – even a small pile of organic material might heat up enough to “burn” plants nearby.

I’d love to have a better use for my garden than having to mow grass on most of it, but that is not feasible. Starting an orchard is not possible due to water voles – hell, even starting and maintaining a firewood coppice is a challenge due to those fuckers. Not to mention that I would still need to mow the grass under the trees. Converting it all into vegetable patches is not doable either, not for one person. In the past, we had geese and rabbits who used up the grass and converted it into edibles, but I am not the right kind of person to have poultry or rabbits. So, mowing and composting are the only ways. That at least helps improve the soil on the vegetable patches significantly over the years.

I am almost on top of the work again, and I should be able to start re-potting bonsai tomorrow. Yesterday it rained, and today I tidied up most of the garden.

Before the rain, I managed to run the garden over with the verticutter again, scraping out an awful amount of mess.

It was a huge, fluffy pile that sagged a bit in the rain but not very much. I was considering what to do with it to accelerate decomposition. Moss takes a very long time to die, even in a pile. And after that, it takes a very long time to decompose because it is very poor in nitrogen. Out of the various ways to add nitrogen, I decided on Calcium cyanamide. It should initially kill all the moss and plant material in the pile, and after a while, when the pile gets colonized by bacteria, it should decompose faster. At least those are my hopes.

I estimated that I will have approx one cubic meter of slightly compressed moss, and for that, according to a quick Google search, about 0.5 kg of fertilizer should suffice. So I took a fork and I tidied up the pile, stomped it down a bit, and added the fertilizer throughout. Then I watered it even more with about 30 l of water. I am curious how this experiment turns out.

Due to everything being wet, I could not shred the reed stalks, so I had to break them manually. I added them around the garlic and strawberries to serve as a mulch.

And I also used a few bundles of reed stalks to line the walkpaths between the vegetable beds. This way, I won’t get mud glued to the soles of my shoes whenever I need to go there after rain. And they also should not get overgrown with weeds.

The first fruit tree started flowering – the rootstock of my plum.

I planted one of these separately and tried to graft the plum on it again, so I have two trees. The graft failed, but the tree continued to grow and eventually flower. I also let a second tree to freely sprout from root suckers because it was growing so vigorously that the plum itself might have problem to actually keep the roots alive. I have seen this happen to aronia grafted on mountain ash and thus I left mountain ash root suckers to grow on my aronia too and it has thus outlived other plants by about a decade by now and it still looks healthy. I do not think the old gardening wisdom of removing all suckers all the time is all that wise in this regard because trees need to have a harmony between what is above and below the ground. The voles managed to destroy some other trees by gnawing the roots faster than they can recover, and in my opinion, it is also possible for trees to die when too slow-growing graft is put on to vigorous stock. It is just my opinion based on my personal experience; I am not aware of any studies on the subject. I do not think one is forthcoming because it would take several decades of dozens of trees to be grown in the same environment and meticulously documenting all outputs. Which won’t happen, it would take too long for even a post-graduate researcher to see the fruits (no pun intended) of their labor.

I actually like the flowers of the rootstock and it is a shame that while it flowers extensively, there is very little fruit on it. Because although the fruit is more stone than flesh, it is actually very tasty. I like the flowers anyway and not everything in the garden needs to be useful to me directly. Although I would argue that providing early food to polinators actually is useful to me down the line.

I put the bell peppers in the greenhouse, but I have not planted them in the ground yet. A bout of frost still can hit us, and I want to be able to move them indoors in case that happens. Nevertheless, the plants are apparently doing well because they have started to flower. I had played a bee with a fine brush because it was still too early for actual bees to get into the greenhouse, even if I left the door open. Which I do not do now, it is often still too cold.

I also re-potted basil and oregano into individual pots, 21 plants of each. The jury is still out on whether they survive and if I manage to grow a sufficient supply of my favourite spices.

And the last flower is on a cutting of a hibiscus that my mother put in a glass of water. Normally, these cuttings drop the flower buds, but this one did not. There won’t be any use out of this, and it is not, strictly speaking, gardening-related. I include it because I think it is beautiful.

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.

[Read more…]

Content warning: at the end below the fold is a picture of a dead animal that some people might find disturbing.

 

Adding thermal mass to my greenhouse seems to be working well so far. There is not that much sun but yesterday the barrels did heat up at almost 23°C in the upper half and they effectively prevented it from overheating during the day and subsequently slightly heating it in the night. I already put in there the growing trays with onion seedlings and they are doing reasonably well so far.

I put a bunch of old aluminum bars across them to serve as a shelf. My father got a lot of them somehow, somewhere when I was a kid and they are very useful around the garden. Practically all my outdoor shelves are from these. I think they are discarded old laths from industrial weaving looms. Some of them have a lot of parallel grooves worn out on one side.

Like every year, I have to harvest and process the wood from my coppice. Although this year I don’t have that much of it since I harvested almost all of it last year and thus this year I only had a significant amount of thicker poles from the pool at the end of my sewage cleaning facility. I did, however, cut and prepare 200 poles for growing beans. I have big beans plans for this year.

The weather was very pretty and warm for a few days, with virtually no rain. That lack of rain is going to be a problem if it does not change soo, but at least I could till my “field” last Monday. I was expecting to be completely knackered after this but I felt surprisingly well and chipper the next day. I planned two days rest but I felt really well so that I continued to work on Tuesday.

Tuesday morning I was carting my parents around to various doctor appointments and shopping but in the afternoon I did have a few hours left. So I took my electric verticutter from the garden shed and I used it to get some of the most egregious moss growth out of the lawn. I intend to use this moss to grow potatoes from last year’s leftovers. It won’t work as well as planting proper seeding potatoes in the ground but it should work well enough to be worth it. I was tired after this, but still not too much. I wanted to have a rest the next day but I got delivered three new fruit trees – one pear and two apples – that needed planting asap. The delivery of the trees was actually slightly delayed, otherwise I would not bother with the moss.

To protect the tree roots from vole damage for at least a few years I dug a hole with approximately 1 m diameter and 30 cm deep. I put a wire mesh in it to protect the sides On the bottom I put stones that I sorted out during the digging and also some thorny brambles from wild brambleberry. I managed to plant one tree on Wednesday and after that I was tired and my back started to hurt. I thought that I would definitely need a rest after I planted the trees. Wrong!

I did not just need a rest, I could barely get out of bed. I had terrible pain in my lower back. I am susceptible to this if my back gets cold so I have to wrap up for work outdoors. But the treacherously sunny weather made me incautious and I did not dress properly for the moss removal and that came to bite me in the ass with vengeance. On Wednesday I felt slight pain and I dressed warmly, but it was too late. Muscles around my sacrum got inflamed and whenever I tried to bend or walk it was like having knives stuck in my pelvis. The worst was when I had to sneeze or cough.

This is where I had a stroke of luck. My nephew came for a visit on Friday. He planted the remaining two trees, helped with heating, and did some shopping while I was barely able to lie down and moan.

Normally when this happens, a few days of dry heat and rest is enough but this time I had to take medication. I started with Paracetamol and when that did not help, I switched to Ibuprofen. I do not like taking analgesics but sometimes there is no other way since I could not even sit at the computer, I had to lie down most of the day. This Wednesday I was finally capable of a short walk, albeit with a cane.

Being able to walk means being able to prepare some soil and plant some seeds. So I filled eight yogurt cups with soil and sown oregano and basil. I have never grown these spices/herbs although I use them in almost every recipe. I am curious as to how they will grow. Does anyone here have experience with how many plants I should plant for a reasonable harvest (1 jam jar of dried shredded stalks)?

The bell peppers thrive under the grow lights reasonably well. I had eight big plants, four of which I gave to my nephew and four of which I repotted today into bigger containers because they were already outgrowing the yogurt ones. I also have a fifth pepper plant, you can see it between the basil and oregano. That one is stunted because the cotyledons did not free properly from the seed shell and thus it did not have proper nutrition at the start. But it seems to be growing and it might catch up with the rest so I did not throw it away yet. Overall I planted 10 seeds and an 80% germination rate is reasonable.

And now a bit gruesome theme, that fits the title of this article too.  [Read more…]

The garlic had a bit of trouble poking through the moss mulch so I removed it two days ago. After that, I got terrible tendinitis in flexor tendons of both of my feet and I could barely walk for nearly two days. Luckily it subsided almost as quickly as it started but I did not manage to re-do the mulching before late frost came. The plants should survive it but it is a bugger nevertheless.

I planted five varieties, and I noted them in the picture. The label for each patch is in its lower left corner. Let us say something about them, starting from the left upper corner. I bought one seeding kit for each variety which consisted of three bulbs, except the last one, which only had two.

Rusinka – the bulbs had huge cloves, but only a few of them in each bulb, I got 23 cloves. It is a purple hardneck variety that allegedly originates from Russia (I am immediately prejudiced against this innocent plant) and it should be fairly frost-resistant. I did not do an exact count now and I can’t do one on the photo due to the bamboo obstructing the view a bit, but it seems that cloves survived winter so far. Huge cloves are a plus but I would prefer to have more of them in each bulb so I do not need to save up too high a percentage of plants to continue growing the variety.

Slavín – the bulbs were reasonably big but had some small-ish cloves – I got 30 cloves overall. This is a purple hardneck variety too and it seems all cloves survived winter and are doing reasonably well. I hope this one does well, I would like to have some choice in my garlic in the following years.

Janko – on delivery, very similar to Rusinka but it had even fewer but bigger cloves in each bulb. I only got 13 cloves. Thus the potential problem remains as with Rusinka. We shall see how this one does. I think all 13 cloves poked out of the ground.

Benátčan – this is the only white softneck variety that I decided to try and whilst I would like to have such a variety in my garden, I am preliminarily not optimistic. I got 50 cloves from the three bulbs and some of them were positively tiny. Even if the garlic is delicious, it is a pain in the ass to work in the kitchen. The plus side, according to the seller, should be a very long shelf-life. We shall see, how it fares. Allegedly softneck varieties do not do so well at my altitude.

Havel – another purple hardneck variety and this one I did not actually buy. My nephew bought two bulbs in the farmer’s market for food but the bulbs were so pretty that I decided to plant the cloves. I got 13 big cloves from just two bulbs and the cloves were pretty evenly sized which is a definitive plus if that continues to be the case. Even in the picture, it can be seen that all 13 cloves survived and are now bigger than all the other varieties. I did not like the president whose name this variety carries but I am still somewhat prejudiced in its favor. I hope it does well, especially I hope it survives this bout of frost since I am still slightly limping and cannot go outside to mulch them again.

After the harvest, I will decide which ones to continue to grow and which ones to discontinue. Nematodes can be a problem with garlic here, although my father used to grow it a lot when I was a kid. And my neighbor used to grow garlic every year right up to the year she died. We shall see how this garlic experiment goes. I would like to grow at least two varieties that do well. To cover my needs, I need to grow approximately 50 bulbs for food and an equal amount of cloves for planting for next year.