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.

 

I will probably write a lot about my gardening adventures this year, both because I will do a lot of experimental stuff and also because I think there should be something to read on the FtB that is not entirely serious, especially in these serious times.

The crocuses started to poke their heads out of the ground, and the garlic too. I only took a picture of the first crocus, the garlic is more useful but less interesting. I haven’t seen any starlings yet, so the time is not entirely up to plant potatoes. But I have seen first bumblebees searching for nesting places and also first butterflies (probably tortoiseshells or some other Nymphalid species that overwinters).

I used the warm and sunny days to plant my first outdoor crop of this season – spinach. I have never tried to grow spinach so I do not know how it will do. I do hope it will do well. The packet said to plant rows 15 cm apart and space the seeds 6 cm within the rows. I changed that to a hexagonal pattern of approximately 10 cm apart. I like planting in hexagonal patterns because it covers the space better and allows the plants to grow more evenly in all directions. It is more difficult to weed, but I generally do not bother with weeding after a certain time because I do not have the time and strength for it anyway. The ground here was covered with woodchips over the winter, I raked those aside for planting and after the spinach plants poke out of the ground, I will put them back as mulch and weed suppression.

I have sown approximately 5 sqm with spinach and we shall see what comes out of it. After the first batch is harvested, I will continue with the second row of spinach, the soil should be rich enough in nitrogen to handle it, it is nearly pure old compost. And it is right next to the coppice so it will be in the shade at noon time during the summer, which should work well for spinach. I hope. Like I said, this is my first time.

The radishes in the greenhouse came out of the ground nicely, it looks promising so far. I will wait a few more days and I will sow the second packet of seeds nearby.

And this is the title of this article.  I know there ain’t such a verb as “to massivate” but I made it up for what I did here – I added mass to my greenhouse. Not for weight, but for heat.

I bought three metal barrels used for industrial storage and transport of marmalade. There were actually still rests of it inside and it was not entirely easy to clean out (it smelled nice but I didn’t dare to eat it and I tossed it on the compost heap). After I cleaned them, I painted them matte black on the outside and smeared a bit of linseed oil inside on the bottom to seal any potential corrosion nuclei in the seams and some scratches. After a few days of waiting for the linseed oil to dry, I filled them with water.

That adds 600 l of water to the greenhouse in a form that should be heated up by the sun during the day and cool off – thus heating the greenhouse – in the night. The barrels take some space but that is not a problem, actually. I put them instead of the shelf where I put my seedling trays in the spring and citrus trees in the summer. I will now put lids on these barrels and my old shelf across the tops and I will have the same growing space that I did before, while hopefully extending my growing season for a few weeks thus getting slightly more tomatoes, peppers, and figs. We shall see how well this works. The barrels were not extremely expensive (about 140 € including the spray paint), but still more than a year’s worth of tomatoes – I would have to grow a surplus of either 30 kg of bell peppers or 60 kg of tomatoes to make up for them. Nevertheless, I hope they will reduce my stress in the spring and fall by not having to worry so much about sudden changes in temperature killing my seedlings or plants or my citrus trees.

Last year, I had approx 25 kg of tomatoes and I will use that as a baseline for my calculation of the “amortization” time for these barrels. As in, if I get 10 kg of tomatoes more, I will estimate the amortization to be 6 years.

If they hold the heat well enough to keep the greenhouse frost-free during a mild winter, I will leave my citrus trees inside over winter too. That would be a huge saving in work.