As I mentioned, I tried to grow carrots for the first time in our garden since I was a kid. The experiment is not concluded yet, but there are some interim results. Firstly, about 10% of the carrots were destroyed or heavily damaged by voles, which forced me to harvest about 30% prematurely. Secondly,  a lot of those that I already harvested looked like this.

This can be caused in two ways, and both were present. The first cause is damage to the roots by, for example, a burrowing pest. The second cause is when the root hits a stone. Multifurcated or whacky-shaped carrots are perfectly edible, of course, but they are significantly more difficult to clean and peel. They also tend to be smaller in weight than those with a single root. Thus, I reached a decision – I will build three raised beds (to be able to rotate crops between them), fortified against rodents, and filled with sieved permeable soil. I found cheap metal raised beds online that I could afford, so I bought them and I started to prepare the terrain.

I started flatterooning the terrain in the place where I have cured my compost heaps, since the compost conveniently killed all vegetation in those spots, which made the job a lot easier. It was  (and will continue to be) hard work, nevertheless. For whatever reason, the topsoil in this part of my garden is relatively compacted heavy clay with lots of stones. I had to first soften it with a garden fork and break the lumps with a hoe before I could start sieving it.

I run the soil first through a coarse sieve, with an approx 20 mm grid. Separating approximately 10% material from the clay in the form of large stones.

After that, I run it through a second sieve, with a ca. 10 mm grid. That removed circa 15% more materiel as smaller stones and left me with finely-sieved clay.

As indicated by the relatively light-brown color when wet, this is not particularly rich soil. On its own, it would tend to become very heavy when wet and compact again when dry. Unfortunately, I have to use it. I do not have a lot of high-quality soil in my garden, and I do not trust bought soils at all; I got burned that way in the past. I still have to mix the clay with something to make it more permeable to water and less prone to compaction. For that, I had to go to another part of my garden.

In the north of my garden is a huge pile that consists of a mixture of old coal ash/clinker and sand. It has been there for over five decades by now, completely overgrown with grass and occasionally small trees. Any harmful chemicals are probably completely leeched into the water table by now, so I do not think using it to lighten the soil will be harmful. I have been using it for my bonsai trees for about a decade by now, and it does not seem to harm them at all. This year, I started to dig it up in a big way, and as you can see, I dug out a metal frame of unknown origins. The pile also contained several bricks, a broken metal rake, some rusted chains, and quite a few pieces of wire and plastic rope. All gifts from my grandfather. I used this metal frame to build a bigger 10 mm mesh sieve to expedite the work.

When I had sieved enough soil and sand for at least one bed, I used the smaller fraction of stones to level the terrain where I had dug out the topsoil. And I placed the completed bed on top of some anti-rodent metal mesh.

I decided to use a 1:1 ratio of soil to sand. That should have moderately good moisture retention, while allowing for drainage of excess. It is a pity I could not prepare the terrain for all three beds at once – the potatoes are in the way.

The beds should be 322 cm long and 100 cm wide, according to the manufacturer. But I realized that if I build them 282 cm long and 140 cm wide, I will have more space (approx 20% more), getting more bang for my buck, and the beds will still be comfortably accessible from the sides. It required a slight modification of the inner bracings, but that problem was solved with material from my scrap pile in a matter of minutes. I put some smaller stones around the inner edges of the bed, and I will also pour them around the outer edges when finished to prevent the rodents from wriggling their way inside between the bed and the mesh easily. Those assholes can fit through very small gaps, and anything to impede their progress helps to lead them away towards softer soil.

With the bed fully assembled and in place, I started filling it. I parked my concrete mixer right next to it, I filled the mixer using buckets with approximately a 1:1 ratio of soil/sand, and I  poured the mix directly into the bed to approximately 50% volume.

With the beds half full with the arguably very poor mix, I sieved some higher-quality soil from a place in my garden where my father composted grass so long ago that it got mixed into the earth by earthworms alone. And I soaked the charcoal I made in the winter in NPK fertilizer.

To fill the rest of the bed, I used a mix of charcoal/fresh compost/good soil/poor soil/sand at a volumetric ratio of 1:1:2:2:4. This should be enough nutrient-rich mix for most crops. It should get better with time, when plant roots permeate it and add more organic matter.

One bed is now filled and complete. I might add some old garden hose around the upper edges – these cheap panels still have some sharp edges where they connect, and one can quite easily scratch on them.

And since I still had some pea seeds left over, I planted them in the new raised bed. They might not have enough time to get a harvest, but they will test whether the mix is viable, show me how well plants fare in it, and they should improve the soil.

Now I am going to sieve more soil and sand so I can continue with the remaining two beds after I harvest the potatoes.

I got sick for a few days. The weather is too cold for this time of year, and I did not dress appropriately while working in the garden, which triggered (probably) a mild strep throat infection that would probably not develop in warmer weather. After a few days of being in bed, drinking paracetamol and elderberry tea, I might be finally getting better today – the throat pain subsided, and both teas started to taste awful. That is a peculiar thing – I strongly dislike the smell and taste of elderberry juice, yet I always try my best to keep a stash in my cellar. Because when I get sick, I get a craving for it. And once I heal, I start hating it again.

But before I got sick, I managed to harvest all the peas I sown two months ago.

I did not manage to do it all in one go; I had to spread the work over several days. It was approximately three buckets of pea pods overall, which my parents shelled in the evenings while watching TV.

I got about 4500 g of green peas from 500 g of seeds. About 500 g was lost to voles and drought, but 4500 is still a respectable amount that made the whole endeavour worth it. Now they are in the freezer awaiting further fate. We are still considering whether to keep them there and slowly use them in soups and foods, or to thaw them all and preserve them in jars.

And whilst I was sick, I was able to take a picture of a frequent visitor to my windowsills.

I hear kestrels chirping all the time, but they are not easy to take a picture of. I am very glad to see them. They are an invaluable vole predator, and if I could convince them to nest nearby, I would.

We finally got some good rain. The groundwater table is still below normal, but the situation is less critical, and the vegetation did get good watering. A few more rains like what we had this week, and the drought might be over. At least now I do not need to spare water even if it does not rain for a month or so again, and I have enough surplus to give my greenhouses a good soak.

Blue grapes are starting to color, although they still have a long way to go. I do not know what causes the drying of the leaf edges on this plant. It does it every year and does not seem to be weather-related. These grapes are delicious, although they do have seeds. It looks promising so far.

The white grapes do not show any meaningful damage on the leaves, and they have even more fruit. In addition to that, this vine grows so fast I have trouble keeping it confined to the greenhouse. These grapes are seedless, even more delicious, and usually I also get a bigger harvest. And since this year the vines were not damaged by late frost, I might get a really substantial amount.

My fig trees got too big and I had to cut them back severely. I might not get any figs this summer, but I might still get some later in the autumn. The summer figs are usually better tasting, but in order to get them, the trees need to be left unpruned in the spring. We shall see if some of the bigger ones start ripening in about a week.

I am trying to grow ginger this year again. I had not much success so far, and I learned that my mistake might have been putting it in direct sunlight. Ginger allegedly likes it warm but shady. So this year I put it under the grapevine in slight shade, but it does not look very promising so far. The weather is apparently not warm enough for ginger, although it is plenty warm for everything else. The gingers are barely starting to poke out of the ground just now.

Tomatoes thrive, both inside and outside the greenhouse. And at both locations, they began to bear fruit, with more in the greenhouse. The plants are so far healthy, so I won’t spray them in the greenhouse with fungicide anymore. I might spray those outside once more, though. They are shielded from rain, but not from fog and dew, so they are still more susceptible to blight. The fruits are still reasonably far from ripening for one more round of fungicide to be safe.

And outside the greenhouse, I counted 12 potential Hokkaido squash. The first one is now fist-sized.

The main Three Sisters patch is now alight with bright red bean and bright yellow pumpkin blossoms. It does look kinda pretty and promising. First corn plants started to show female blossoms too, so that might not be a complete waste of resources in the end. And I am still impatiently waiting for the butternut pumpkins to take off. So far, they still grow very slowly and show no sign of blooming. But as long as the plants grow, there is hope I will get some use out of them, and we still have about 50 days before first frost. When I was a kid, it was not unusual to get the first frost in the second half of September. In later years, though, it usually comes in the second half of October or even later. We shall see how the weather turns out – it is a factor I cannot influence, yet it has a huge impact on the outcome of my labor.

The pumpkins started to grow and appear to be accelerating now.

The butternut squashes are the least advanced since they are the last that were planted. Funnily enough, one of those surplus ones that I planted with red beets is the biggest, and I had to start teasing it onto the aluminium trellis. I think that these grow faster than those planted in the lawn because the soil is more porous here.

The first female flower of the Hokkaido pumpkin showed up. It was probably pollinated and is starting to convert into the fruit now.

Some Hokkaido plants are getting bigger and they started to crawl out of the 50×50 cm squares onto the grass. I probably won’t be able to mow the grass between and around the poles again, which is OK, this was always the plan. I will be chuffed if I get two fruits per plant by the end of the season. If I get more, I’d be thrilled.

I started to harvest the marrow squash already. When harvested this small, they do not need to be peeled, although they do have prickly hairs that need to be rubbed off. They are sweeter than zucchini and are really juicy and tender.

That is why this first harvest was simply chopped into slices, covered wth spice and tossed in a baking tray with a duck for the last 20 minutes of baking.

If things go well, they should now accelerate in growth until we are no longer able to eat them fast enough, and they get bigger and with harder skin. I will write about the use of the bigger fruits in due course, with recipes.

And lastly a picture of a longhorn beetle that I captured in my coppice with my phone. It was a fast moving critter, I would not be able to go inside for proper camera in time. But I think this pic is worth publishing anyway. I am not an entomologist, but it was found on a willow, so I think it is a musk beetle, Aromia moschata. It is beautiful, although its larvae might destroy some trees in my coppice in due course. Which is not a big problem, the trees need to be replaced each decade or two anyway.

 

I mentioned the raspberry growth behind my garden already, there is even a picture in one of the older posts. Here is a new one.

It is just outside my garden, on the east side of the fence. It is an ideal spot for raspberries – they get full morning sun, but as the day gets hotter in the afternoon, they become shielded by my copicce poplars.

It is a mixed growth of probably domesticated, wild, and hybrid raspberries. Some shoots have prickles, most do not; some have fruits consisting of a lot of small drupelets, some of just a few big ones. Technically, it does not belong to me, but I take care of it and harvest most of the fruit. And anyone who goes by can harvest that fruit as well, and nobody, not even the owner of the meadow, can object to that. The Czech Republic has roaming laws about accessibility to landscapes, so a meadow is freely walkable unless it is currently being grazed by cattle or for similar safety reasons. And wild fruits and mushrooms are a common good that anyone can take. So even when these raspberries technically grow on someone else’s property, I am neither trespassing nor stealing.

Shortly after the Iron Curtain fell, some of the new forest and meadow owners tried to restrict public access to their land. Yet others tried to collect fees from people who took wild fruit or mushrooms.  There was a very public education campaign teaching people what is and is not allowed.

I also have to mow the grass about 1 to 1,5 m adjacent to my fence. The owner uses the meadows surrounding my house mostly for hay production, and the tractor cannot mow that close. And even when they used the meadows as pastures, there was a gap between the electric fence and my property that I still had to mow. That is how the growth got established in the first place when I was a kid – my father did not mow the grass around the garden, nor did the tractors, and thus raspberries took hold.

Occasionally, I flatten and subsequently fertilize the whole growth to rejuvenate it, forgoing that year’s harvest. But this is one of those years when I have a huge harvest.

The fruit is so aromatic that even my stunted sense of smell can enjoy it.

We have several kg of fruit already, and we should get even more in the next week or so. Luckily, we finally got some rain, and although it was not much, raspberries did benefit from it. I cannot water them; that would really be too much strain on my water resources.

So far, most of the fruit goes into the freezer. Once the harvest is over, it will be thawed, juice pressed out of it, and cooked into jam that lasts for years. However, I did take about 1 kg and dehydrated it.

Dehydrated raspberries are not very good food. They are sour and have the consistency of coarse sand. So why make them? Because I plan to mix them with sweet dehydrated pears in the fall, put the mix into a food processor and blend them together. The resulting powder makes for a very tasty and aromatic fruit tea in the winter.

So far, I have had very little success, since most of the growth season is still in the future, and thus only time will tell. Unfortunately, I had several definitive fails already. Some anticipated, some new.

Let’s start with the radishes. In the greenhouse, they were a definitive success. I harvested over 3 kg of radishes from sowing two packets. Outdoors, they were a failure; I harvested barely over 0,5 kg from one packet. Some were woody, some bolted before bulking, and all were heavily damaged by flea beetles. The cause of all that was likely the same that led to the failure of spinach: an abnormally warm and dry spring. The season essentially started a month earlier and got a rude interruption a month later.

The basil was a complete fail. It was heavily damaged by the late frost and completely dried in the subsequent drought.

Next, the strawberries. I had some, but just enough to eat them raw for breakfast for a few days. This was expected. I essentially started them anew this year, so they did not have deep enough roots to cope with the drought and the heatwave. No amount of watering can help with that.

All of the garlic Havel and a few plants of the other varieties got some fungal disease, and I had to harvest them prematurely in order to try and salvage something. It is still questionable whether I will have a lot of garlic or none at all. I do not know what specific fungal disease it is; it might be Botryotinia porri.

I have no slug damage worth speaking of this year, but the vole infestation has reached unprecedented levels. My garden looks like Emmental cheese.

They dug under the onions, although they did not eat any. They also dug under and ate some of the carrots, forcing me to start harvesting them prematurely to prevent losing them completely. They ate the roots of several bean plants. And they started to try to dig their way to the roots of my newly planted trees as if they were honing in on them – holes started to appear around the wire mesh circumferences that I used to protect them.

I tried to put down traps, but the fuckers learned how to trip them and take the food out afterwards. In the end, I had to resort to poison to at least reduce the pests before they completely overrun my garden. To reduce the risk to cats, hedgehogs, and other mammals, I am putting it directly into the burrow entrances and covering it with a bucket. I did not have to do this for decades, and I hope I won’t need to do it again.

If not for the voles, planting carrots in the egg trays would be a success, although I did not water them all quite enough. Some got big, some remained tiny.

So the lessons:

I won’t grow radishes outdoors anymore, only in the greenhouse as a pre-crop. The weather is too strange now, and older wisdoms and pranostics no longer apply. I can no longer rely on my books, Google,  or even the seed packets for proper planting/sowing times.

I need to wait to plant basil outdoors for later, and I need to water it a lot. It seems rather thirsty. I did not give up on it this year yet – I bought seedlings in the supermarket in the vegetable aisle. The weather is now cool and cloudy, ideal for hardening them off before planting them outdoors.

Next year, I will do minimal disruption to the strawberry growth that I planted this year. Strictly speaking, this is not a new lesson, only a reiteration of one already learned.

To grow garlic, I need at least three beds with more permeable soil that I can disinfect, and I probably should spray my garlic with some fungicide, just as I do with potatoes and tomatoes. I am also making sure that no peels or offcuts of garlic get onto the compost pile; from now on, I will burn it all.

And lastly, to grow carrots and other root vegetables, I need rodent-proof beds.

Those two last lessons coalesced in the conclusion that I need at least three separate raised garden beds that I can fill with a custom soil mix. I wanted to build them from materials I have lying around, since they were rather expensive the last time I looked. But before I started to build, I checked again and I found three very nice 322x100x36 cm raised beds at a discount price I could afford, so I ordered them. I will reinforce the bottoms with wire mesh, and fill them with a mix of soil that I am reasonably certain is healthy, sand/clinker (I have two piles over 50 years old, of coal ash, clinker, and sand in my garden, overgrown with grass, I use it to lighten the soil for bonsai already), compost, and biochar. Then I can rotate garlic, carrots, beets, and bush beans between these beds to ensure the soil is not overtaxed by just one crop planted in it repeatedly, and that species-specific pathogens do not accumulate. I will probably add sunflowers or hemp in the rotation a few times, in case there are still some bioavailable heavy metals in the old coal ash piles.

And that is that for now, I will continue to grow, and we will see what comes out of it.