I was busy as a bee since the last article, and I did not have much time (and strength) for writing.

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For one, I had several tomato plants that did not fit into my greenhouse. Simply planting them outdoors would, in all likelihood, end in disaster, as it did in the last three seasons. Thus, I have built an impromptu shelter to shield them from rain. The roof is made from old and damaged PC greenhouse sheets. We will see if this really helps to stave off the Phytophtora infestans.

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Beans behind the house started to climb the supports, even flower, and the corn looked very promising. And today, a disaster struck. Voles dug holes right near my house, and they destroyed three bean plants and one corn plant. They never made holes this close to the house, so it took me by surprise. I put down bait and traps and I hope to eradicate those fuckers before they do even more damage. This year is relatively dry so far, which helps to keep the slugs under control. On the other hand, the dry weather suits voles better. Last spring, voles destroyed nothing, and slugs did significant damage. This year, it is the exact opposite.

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All three Three Sisters patches are now fully planted. The plants take it slow so far; most beans are not climbing yet, and the corn and pumpkins are still growing very slowly, if at all. I do hope that changes soon. It usually does. Especially the pumpkins tend to have kinda exponential growth – starting slowly at first and after a certain point becoming unmanageable in a very short time.

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I still had ten surplus butternut squash plants. So I took a fork to a patch of land between my greenhouse and the coppice, where compost lay in previous years. The soil is not very good, but it is relatively stone-free, and the grass was not very deep-rooted yet. I worked some fresh compost into it; pumpkins do not mind.

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I want to try to grow the butternut squash vertically on this patch, so I built an impromptu scaffolding for them to climb. These are old fencing panels that my father made from previously mentioned aluminium profiles when I was a kid. He used them to keep ducks and geese off the vegetable patches. They are useful around the garden to this day.

I was thinking about what companion plant I could add to these pumpkins, and I decided to sow the whole bed with red beets. Beets do not mind shade, and if the pumpkins grow vertically, it could work. We shall see. The green stuff on the ground is duckweed – I watered this patch thoroughly with water from the pond at the end of my sewage cleaning facility. A bit more about that next time.