Now that we have warm weather, the garden is growing fast. There is a visible difference from one day to the next.

The oats are just about to bloom, and it does look promising, even though about a third of the patch has visibly lower growth due to poor soil quality.

Yesterday, I was worried about whether the Painted Mountain corn would germinate, and today the first plants started to poke out of the soil. If we have a warm September and a frost-free autumn until at least the first week in October, they might even fully ripen.

There are a few soybean plants here and there. I will wait about a month until they are all visible well, and then I will sow green peas in areas where they failed. If the weather stays warm long enough, I might get some of my own seed for next year, although most definitely not enough to actually eat. Next year, I will not grow soy in rows, but in clusters of 5 plants. That way I can try to start enough plants in cups early and plant them outdoors once the frost risk is over, as I do with other beans. It won’t allow for large-scale growing like direct sowing in rows does, but it should still allow me to cover a reasonably large patch.

The green peas that I intend to let fully ripen to get my own seeds for next year are very lush and vigorous. I hope this continues and I get a few kg of viable seeds, because this variety grows very fast and is thus suitable not only for food, but also for improving, protecting, and fertilizing the soil as a cover crop.

The green peas intended for actual harvest for food look nowhere near as lush, but I should still get my work’s worth out of the patch.

The yellow peas look vigorous and healthy too, albeit the growth has bald spots due to a poor germination rate (only about 50%). These were actually sold as a green fertilizer, but they grow slower than the green peas, and they apparently need higher temperatures to start growing. However, I would like to get my own seeds for the future, because these peas are more suitable for producing dry seed for long-term storage.

Alfalfa is growing, but it is not what is in the picture. This is bush vetch Vicia sepum.

The seeds are very small, but the pods are big enough for manual harvest and shelling. So this year, I decided to mow my lawn around these and to collect as many seeds as possible. If I succed to get reasonable amount, then next year I will till a patch dedicated to these to get even more seed. The plant is not edible, but it is an excellent nitrogen fixer. And unlike alfalfa or peas, it is a local plant – it is guaranteed to thrive here. I only need to help it spread more than it is capable of doing on its own.

Da potatoes are a’ growin’. Some of it is good, some of it is bad, some of it is even ugly. But they all started to flower, and the flowers aren’t ugly. It also means that about a month from now I will probably be able to harvest the early varieties.

The indeterminate variety “Agrie” has white flowers, and it is the one that contains most of the “ugly” plants, unfortunately. Some plants have dark green, curled-up leaves, which might be a sign of too much nitrogen. In all probability, I did not spread the fertilizer wide enough in some areas. About 70% of the plants look normal, so it is not a total catastrophe. We will see what comes of it.

The second indeterminate variety “Dali” has white flowers too, and all plants look healthy.

Both indeterminate varieties could do with some more hilling up, but I do not have the material to do so. Which is unfortunate; a few plants were damaged by strong winds. They are just too tall and frail due to how abnormally quickly they grew. I am not experienced in applying fertilizer, and it seems my soil was more fertile than I thought.

The very early variety “Bellarosa” has light pink flowers and light green leaves. These are grown in the Ruth Stout method, which is not conducive to over-fertilizing, but it is very good for slugs. Whenever it rains, I collect quite a few of them in this growth. The slug infestation is nowhere near as severe as it was two years ago, but I still suspect the tubers will be damaged by them as well.

The early variety “Camel” has flowers of an even darker shade of pink. Even the green parts have a reddish tint to them, and the growth is thus distinctly darker than the adjacent “Bellarosa”. They are also smaller and sturdier than all the other varieties. These were damaged by voles or mice, so there are a few bald patches in the growth and a few plants are stunted. However, the rest took off well, and they look healthy.

Overall, potatoes do look promising, albeit not perfect. I will not be satisfied if I get anything less than 300 kg, but if I get more than 200 kg, it will be worth the effort.

This weekend, they all get a second dose of fungicide to prevent blight. These varieties should all be resistant, but it is better to be safe than sorry. I was successful in keeping my potatoes blight-free for years, and I do not want to break the streak.

 

Some plants are taking off and looking promising.

Alfalfa is almost knee-high, and even the bald patches have some plants here and there. The yellow peas (on the far end of the photo) also look healthy, albeit they still have not started to bloom.

The first patch of green peas is full of pods now, and they are beginning to swell. I hope to get several kg of canned/frozen green peas from this. And I still have three 0,25 kg packets of green peas to sow during the summer if something else fails and I have spare space. Which I shall have because…

The soy beans failed spectacularly. There might be a soybean plant somewhere in this picture, but I cannot find it. I can find several plants in the field, but they are very small and sickly. The reasons are several.

1. The seeds themselves had only about a 60% germination rate when tested separately. And even some of those that sprouted looked weird; the roots had no proper tip for burrowing into the soil and curled in on themselves like a pig’s tail.
2. Some seeds sprouted, grew several cm long, and suddenly the whole seedling emerged above the ground, lay flat, and died due to exposure. I am completely dumbfounded by this; I have never seen anything like that, ever.
3. Many seedlings were damaged by slugs, because their emergence from the ground coincided with cold and wet weather.
4. This bout of cold weather was really cold, below 10°C at night in June, which is weird and not really good for the garden.

There are some soybean plants here and there, but overall, I will be lucky if I get a handful of unripe soybeans at the end of the year. Great disappointment. If I get some viable ripe seeds, I will be really surprised. Lesson learned – I might be able to grow a few soybean plants if I pre-grow them in pots as seedlings and put them outdoors when they are tall-ish. Or to grow them in the greenhouse. But my location does not allow for large-ish scale growing.

The white and brown bush beans do not look much better; the seeds mostly rotted away (0% germination when tested separately indoors!), but at least enough emerged so it does look like I might get enough plants to get my own quality seeds for subsequent years. To sow them directly into the soil for large-ish-scale growing, I will probably have to do so in the first week of June at the earliest. Thus, I need to find some variants with a short vegetation period, and that might take some time. On that front, we get to the title of today’s post.

I mentioned to my nephew the poor germination rate of bean seeds these last two years, and he told me about a webshop with a money-back guarantee for seeds that do not germinate. They also purposely sell variants that allow saving one’s own seeds for the future, heirloom varieties, and genetically diverse mixes that allow for one’s own selective breeding. The seeds are expensive, but I bought 48 seeds of an old bush bean variety that should have a short vegetation span. I planted them in pots to get them started quicker in the greenhouse, and I hope to have some plants to grow outside once the cold spell subsides and the summer begins in earnest.

And to plant them, I had to make a new vegetable patch. Luckily enough, I was making hot compost again, and it burned this ca 3×3 square in my lawn. The burned parts were really easy to till with a garden fork, because the composting not only killed all the grass, it completely dissolved its roots. The hardest work was around the edges, where there was still live, tough grass. I wish I could make huge compost heaps to kill grass on large areas.

However, 3×3 m is a small patch for my garden, but it is a bit much for a handful of beans. But I did not buy only beans; I also bought several other seeds for the next year, and I am especially excited about these:

I wanted to try this crop for years; I knew it existed, but I did not know the exact name of the variety, so I could not find seeds. And coincidentally, this supplier had them, and they were not prohibitively expensive. So I bought 300 seeds, and I sowed 60 of them today to test them.

It is the variety “Painted Mountain,” and it should be exactly what I need at my elevation – hardy and with short vegetation. Ideally, it should have been sown last month, but it still might fully ripen if the fall is frost-free until the middle of October. Which is not a guarantee, but it might happen. And whilst it will not be as sweet as a modern sweet corn variety, it still should be perfectly edible and tasty for an early harvest. In any case, I soaked the seeds in water overnight to expedite germination by a few days.

So now I have a 3×3 square sown with corn, and around the edges I will plant the bush beans. A two-sister patch, if you like.

I already have another corn variety sown in the garden, as does my neighbor, so there might be some cross-pollination, but probably not much, and it should not affect the quality for an early harvest (and I won’t need to save my own seeds this year). And for next year, I have already discussed the issue with my neighbors, and we will both grow only this variety.

And to finish today, I harvested the first significant amount of strawberries this year, 1850 g. There were nearly no slugs on them, which surprised me, though I am definitely not complaining. If the weather gets warm and sunny now, I might look forward to a substantial harvest this year. I hope I get one; we already ate all the marmalade and dehydrated strawberries from two years ago, and we need to refresh our stock.

I had such a surplus of tomato plants this year that I decided to make another makeshift shelter to grow them outside the greenhouses.

I used the portable trellises to do so by wiring five pairs slightly offset to stand in an A-shape and then using the last pair for a roof to support the plastic foil. I then planted the tomatoes between the A-shapes so when they start to grow in height, they can lean on the trellises. We shall see how this goes. The biggest problem could be temperature. If the summer is too cold, tomatoes won’t grow outdoors fast enough. The second big problem could be sunshine. This area gets only about 6-8 hours of direct sunshine; the first half of the day it is in shade. In my experience, tomatoes do not actually need direct sunshine to thrive; temperature is more important. But like all plants, they need enough light to photosynthesise, and I am not entirely certain they will get it here. Well, we shall at least see if these trellises work for this purpose.

Things are growing. Some well, some badly.

The indeterminate potatoes “Agrie” look promising. They are now tall enough to be hilled up, which I will do this weekend.

The same goes for “Dali”, although those might need a few more days to reach sufficient height. These two varieties look really promising, they even were not damaged by late frost.

The very early variety “Bellarosa” was damaged by late frost, despite being covered with white cloth. But the damage was not very severe and it appears that the plants are recovering now.

The early variety “Camel” is a headscratcher. They still did not all emerge from the ground, and those that did are still tiny. Some were also probably destroyed by voles who had nests under the PVC mats. But that only explains the empty spots, not the stunted plants. Maybe they will take off later.

The garlic “Dukát” looks promising, albeit the leaves are a bit yellow near the tips, so I added nitrogen today (very dilute KNO3 solution). Mulch from old leaves works very well at suppressing weeds.

Onions and carrots, on the other hand, look downright pitiful. The seedsnails for the onions did not work well – using the landscaping cloth was a mistake, plastic wrap would work better. On top of that, they really suffered in the cold May weather.

For some reason, the trick with egg trays did not work for the carrots either; only about a third emerged from the ground. I think I made a mistake and buried them too deeply. I tried to sow some seeds directly into the soil now, it should still result in reasonably sized carrots, if they manage to survive the heat

Spinach from seeds sown directly into the ground failed again; spinach from seedlings fared a bit better, though still nothing to write home about. It just seems I do not have the soil or climate, or both, for it. I will harvest it this weekend, and I will plant summer squash in its stead. That was the plan all along, only I was hoping to harvest more Spinach than I realistically will.

I concentrated on increasing my ability to grow things vertically in several ways this year. I already mentioned some in passing, but let’s write specifically about just that.

I completely reworked the supports for runner beans near the south wall of my house. Instead of running the clothesline in a zig-zag fashion between the rain gutter and the poles at the bottom, I run it in such a way that each pole has only one clothesline running to it from a wire support on the gutter. The wire supports also serve a secondary role of strengthening the gutter laterally (it got bent out of shape by heavy ice and snow). I also increased the number of plants that can be planted there, so hopefully, I will get bigger harvests and a better coverage of the wall against the hot summer sun.

I repaired more of the old aluminium fencing that my father used to keep poultry in check. I used it last year as a trellis for butternut squash, and I am trying to do the same this year. Growing butternut squash vertically allows for denser planting of the plants and thus better use of space.

Unfortunately, all my butternut and hokkaido plants are rather pathetic. I was away from home for three days, and I did not want to burden my nephew with having to drag them indoors every evening, so I left them in the greenhouse. And as bad luck would have it, it was exactly those three days when the weather was so cold that even in the greenhouse the temperatures fell below 10°C. As a result, all my winter squash plants are yellowish and sickly looking. But I got them outdoors a month earlier than last year, and most of them are starting to grow healthy green leaves again, so they might not be lost yet.

I also had several aluminium frames approximately 180×90 cm in size. I repaired them, and to convert them into portable trellises for beans, tomatoes, and pumpkins, I covered them with PVC-coated welded wire fencing mesh.

I made 12 of these portable trellises, and I hope they last me for years. This year, I intend to use them mainly for an improvised shelter and support for tomatoes, because I have more tomato plants than fit into my greenhouse, and I do not want to throw them all simply away.

To finish the post, have a look at some very nice Aquilegia blossoms.

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.

 

In our hypothetical scenario, despite the carbohydrate-heavy diet, caloric excess and a lack of exercise would not be things that happen, ever.  But a healthy lifestyle does not guarantee health. And it is not possible to be self-sustainable with regard to medicine. With that being stated, medicinal herbs do exist, and they do work. And since I am writing this series from my point of view, I would like to mention three that I consider essential and extremely helpful. For all three, I did look up studies on PubMed in the past, and although there are not a lot of them, to my amateur eye, it looks like they are proven to work to some extent. I am including quickly found links today, too, although I need to stress that I am not a physician and this article is not meant as medical advice.

So what health problems could arise that need to be addressed frequently-ish, but do not necessarily need professional medical attention?

First thing would be minor scratches, cuts, splinters, and suchlike. I have a lot of scratches and cuts on my hands and legs. Most heal without me even noticing them, but a lot of the work involves soil, and thus some get inflamed (which is why I am up to date on my tetanus shot). And for minor inflammations, there is nothing like hot chamomile tea, IMO (-click-). In my experience, soaking an inflamed area in chamomile tea as hot as is bearable cuts the healing time by several days, and reduces the pain to almost nothing within minutes. I also occasionally get sniffles bad enough that my stomach gets upset. In that case, drinking a chamomile tea also helps to clean the tubes and restore lost appetite.

The second thing happening probably on a regular basis would be a sore throat, sniffles, and suchlike, from exertion in cold weather. Most would resolve without a problem, some could become a mild strep infection or viral infection if the conjunction of pathogen presence and bad weather is just right (bad). And some of those can become bad enough to need antibiotics, which only a medical doctor can prescribe. I know I have a bad case of sore throat coming when I get a craving for elderberry tea, made from black elderberry juice (Sambucus nigra). I absolutely loathe the taste of elderberry juice, hot or cold, but when I get sick, I get a craving for it that I never get for anything else. It helps (-click-), sometimes to the point that I do not need to go to the doctor after all. However, once I heal, I go back to hating elderberries again. I haven’t drunk elderberry tea for over two years now, but I do keep a stock in my cellar just in case.

And the third often appearing problem would be bruises, sprained ligaments, slightly banged-up-but-not-yet-broken bones, as well as stress fractures, and, of course, back pain. In this regard, comfrey root is your friend (-click-). I am either using store-bought creams or an alcohol-based infusion that I made a few years ago, and I apply them directly to the affected area.

All these could be easily grown in our self-sustainability scenario. An elderberry bush could be part of the fruit shrubbery. Cammomile, once introduced, would probably thrive quite well as a weed that would need more to be managed than harvested. And comfrey could be grown anywhere near the compost heap, in half-shade and with plenty of water. In addition to the medicinal use of its roots, comfrey leaves are also a great nitrogen source for composts.