The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 0 – Thoughts, not Prayers.

I hope you won’t mind if I continue blogging about my garden next year too. There is a lot I learned, and a lot I want to try. And in this post, I shall sum up some of the lessons learned about some crops and how I intend to proceed with them next year.

Seeds

I already bought most of the seeds for the next year, and I am storing them in my cool, dark cellar for now. I only bought seeds from one producer, the same one with whose pumpkin and tomato seeds I had an excellent experience for years. We shall see if that excellent experience will apply to other plants too. I also bought the seeds directly from the producer to avoid the seeds being spoiled by improper storage or handling at the retailers. The experience with the webshop was excellent.

Onions & Garlic

In the past, I had great success with growing onions from sets, but never from seeds, and garlic used to grow pretty well here. This year, I had no real success with either; quite a lot of the plants were destroyed by some fungal disease, and a lot of the harvest had to be tossed subsequently, too.

Onions are not that expensive to be worth a lot of effort. Nevertheless, I will try them again, but only from seeds. I will plant them in raised beds with more permeable soil, and I will spray them with fungicide, which is, btw, recommended on the seed packets that I bought (it was not on the packets I bought last year).

For garlic, I bought a new variety – Dukát -, and I planted it in the single raised bed that I managed to fill with substrate before the frost came. I also saved and planted 10 huge cloves from the variety Janko, which was the least affected by the fungal disease this year. To prevent contaminating the new raised bed in case these cloves are carrying the disease, I planted them in a tiny 50×70 cm bed that I prepared extra.

Beans & Peas

Beans are one of the most reliable and nutritious crops that I can grow, but very labor-intensive in the spring. I cannot sow them directly into the soil, the growing period is too short for that. And preparing the trellises and starting the seedlings is a lot of work. So the next year, I will try to reduce the labor a bit.

For runner beans, I will probably only grow the white variety. I have 50 seeds, and I prepared 25 permanent trellis poles on the south wall of my house for them.

For ordinary pole beans, I will probably only grow the yellow “Konstantin” variety. To save space, I will probably plant them as a companion crop; however, not with beans or corn, but with potatoes.

Instead of a lot of trellised beans, I will try bush beans in greater numbers, as a companion plant to the pattypan and zucchini squashes. We grew bush beans in the past, but mostly varieties for bean pods. I bought a variety suitable for harvesting dry seeds, because I have reason to think this year’s pod harvest will last us for two years.

I will grow some sweet green peas, and I also bought some super cheap pea seeds to sow as a green fertilizer. Peas do well here, I will try for two harvests.

And something new – I want to try growing soy beans, even though I am a bit too far north and too high up for that to work reliably. The day length could be too long for the plants to begin to bloom in time to produce the pods that fully ripen, and if the weather is cold, it might compound the problem. However, I want to try it, and I bought an early variety (Liska) that might grow here – it does allegedly grow in Canada, after all. I will plant it in the ploughed patch where potatoes were this year, and my reasoning is that even if the crop itself fails, as a legume, it should improve the soil. If it produces seeds but they fail to ripen fully, they still should be edible if they get most of the way there – they just will have to be canned/frozen like green peas, and I will not get my own seeds. And if only a part of the plants produce viable seeds for subsequent seasons, that would be a win too, since I would be essentially breeding a variety suited for my garden specifically. So the way I see it, it should be a win either way; the seeds weren’t very expensive.

Carrots

This crop surprised me this year the most of all, and despite minor setbacks, the only one that surprised me in a positive way. I will try to grow them again as a companion crop with onions, this time in rodent-proof raised beds.

Spinach

The biggest disappointment of this year. I might not grow this crop at all in the future, since this year it failed in the spring as well as in the fall. If I try it again, I will try to sow it into eggtrays first and plant outdoors only bigger and healthier plants. Right now, I have no seeds and no real plans.

Grains

I know corn can be grown here. It was grown for cow feed when I was a kid, directly behind my house; it continues to be grown nearby in Germany, just a few km away, and at the same elevation. And it definitely can get ripe enough for sweet corn, even though usually not enough for saving my own seeds. So I will try again. I intend to plant it in large clusters in the middle of my growing beds. This time on my prime soil – growing it together with beans in the lawn has not worked well at all, although it is hard to say how much of that failure was due to the weather.

And I want to try and grow naked oats because it is the only other grain, after corn, that I can fully process at home.

Pumpkins/Squash

Just like with corn, I know for a fact that pumpkins and squash can be grown here and produce huge harvests, so I shall try again. I plan to grow three varieties in three colors each – pattypan, zucchini, and Hokkaido. I also plan to try for butternut squash again. I will probably plant the vine varieties together with the corn, on the edges of the vegetable patches, so they can sprawl onto the lawn, and the bushy varieties together with bush beans. I will try to grow some of each on a trelisse, to save space.

And since nowI have seeds from a supplier whose seeds have reliably germinated quickly in the past, I hope to avoid the first big problem I had with butternut and Hokkaido this year – very late germination. I will try to get at least two plants of each variety to grow as early as possible, and I will plant the seeds into bigger containers, so the roots do not get restricted too early before they can be planted outdoors.

In addition to all these, I also bought a variety meant for seeds. I like snacking on pumpkin seeds, so I hope it works out.

And the thing I want to try completely anew here is lufa. I did grow cucumbers in the greenhouse in the past with good results, so it should be possible to grow this, too. I am intrigued by the idea of a compostable dish-scrubber, and the seeds are edible, just like pumpkin’s.

Potatoes

The next year, I will buy 20-30 kg proper seedling potatoes. One variety is already decided – Dali – because it can be dehydrated and stored without discoloration. I will decide on other varieties in the spring, but I won’t go with the same ones we grew these last years. And I will plant at least half of them the same way I planted them this year, in order to kill off another part of the lawn and prepare it for cultivation. As I mentioned, I may accompany them with beans, either with pole beans, or with bush beans, or both.

Bell Peppers

The bell peppers were not a huge success, but I do not want to give up on them. I had five plants this year, two were looking miserable, so I tossed them, but three looked healthy enough for me to try to overwinter them.

Tomatoes

There can never be too many tomatoes. They are tasty, nutritious, and expensive. And they can be made into canned goods that last for years. I will try growing tomatoes outdoors under a shelter again, as well as in the greenhouse. I bought different varieties from those that I grew this year. One is an indeterminate yellow cherry tomato that I grew before, and that should work well, and one is a determinate variety that I do not know. I decided to try it out because, according to the description, it should bear fruit early, and it should be especially high in lycopene, making it suitable for richly colored sauces.

Fruit and Nuts

I planted most of my fruit and nut trees, and there is not much that I can do about them now. The harvests with those are extremely dependent on the weather, especially in the spring.

I do want to try something, however – I have two seedlings of Corylus colurna. I want to try and graft Corylus avellana from my neighbor’s bush on it (I asked him if I could take a graft). In principle, the resulting plant should work similarly to Aronia melanocarpa grafted on Sorbus avium, producing a small-ish tree instead of a bush.

I won’t grow raspberries at all; I will topple the whole growth and fertilize it with wood ash to rejuvenate it a bit. I do not need raspberries after this year’s harvest.

I hope to get a usable amount of strawberries from the beds that I established this spring.

Figs, Pomegranates, Grapes, and Citrusses

I won’t cut figs back as much as I did this year, so the harvest might be bigger. I will further prune my pomegranates and keep only a few of the strongest plants. I won’t do anything much about grapes; they look happy where they are and thrive with the care I was giving them.

The citrus trees will probably not survive the winter. They never blossomed, and these last few years, they aren’t even pretty to look at. So I left them in the greenhouse overwinter to fend for themselves. If they survive (improbable), they get another chance. If they die, I will have less work.

Spices

Basil froze, but I will try again now that I know it is susceptible to late frost. Oregano got established, and some plants might survive the winter. If they do, I will plant them in some permanent spot. The weather was a bit too cold for ginger, but the plants survived, so I will keep them overwinter indoors and try again next year.

Flowers

I only grow gladioli as ornamental flowers, because my mother likes them. I will try to buy some new bulbs next year, because over the years, all colors died or were eaten by voles, except one.

And if time and space allow, I would love to grow some sunflowers. Not for food, but for bees and birds.

And that’s all I have so far. These last few years, I managed to expand the cultivated area of my garden by circa 50 sqm every spring, and as long as I have the time and strength, I would like to continue that trend. It is better than mowing a useless lawn.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 57 – The Reckoning

This is the last post about this year’s gardening endeavours. This is the approximate harvest:

Potatoes: 54,00 kg
Blueberries: 0,24 kg
Onions: 19,26 kg
Red beets: 1,00 kg
Garlic: 0,5 kg
Pumpkins: 20,27 kg
Pumpkin seeds: 0,05 kg
Bean pods: 6,98 kg
Figs: 0,68 kg
Beans: 7,05 kg
Grapes: 5,66 kg
Pears: 6,48 kg
Green peas: 4,50 kg
Apples: 20,47 kg
Strawberries: 1,96 kg
Sweet Corn: 0,40 kg
Horseradish: 0,91 kg
Raspberries: 20,29 kg
Carrots: 15,24 kg
Walnuts (shelled, dried): 10,51 kg
Bell peppers: 1,81 kg
Tomatoes: 27,12 kg
Radishes: 4,29 kg
Plums: 52,80 kg

The overall monetary value of all this produce at prices during the harvest would be approximately 1.000 €, but nearly one-third of that is due to the huge amount of raspberries that I had this year. Raspberries are expensive, but not particularly nutritious or useful. And of course, we processed all this further, so all the canned sauces, marmalades, etc., are probably double/triple that value in money.

Nutritionally, all this would account for circa 30% of one person’s yearly calories, but I could not eat all that, not even in one year – nearly a third of the calories are in the walnuts alone, and I cannot eat more than a handful of those once in a while. We gave away most of those anyway, or exchanged them for honey with a friend who is a beekeeper.

Strictly speaking, this was not a bad harvest, even though the pumpkins, corn, garlic, and onions were essentially failed crops, and the potatoes underperformed significantly. The garden is now covered in snow, and I will have a few months in which to be depressed and have to do other things. And to think about what I will do the next season.

Kneeling Chair – Part 1 – Proe-toe-type

Not being able to sit in an ordinary chair for over a month finally pushed me over the edge with a project that I had been contemplating for several years now – a kneeling chair. I could simply buy one; they are not that expensive. But I wanted to make one, to be sure that it is comfortable. In order to achieve that goal, I decided to first make a prototype from firewood. And I started by following this YouTube tutorial:

I made some changes to the process – firstly, I glued all pieces together before cutting the angles at the end.

Then I proceeded more or less as the video shows, until I ended up with a functional chair.

I cut the foam from an old bed mattress, and instead of wooden pegs, I used M8 carriage bolts. When testing it, I could sit on it comfortably and work on the PC, but I found the distance-setting brace annoying. The teeth cut in the softwood were not very strong, and one broke off before I even started. And whenever I needed to pick it up or move it in any way, it would dislodge and flop around. So I changed it to one with drilled holes. That means I cannot re-adjust the angle and height quickly and easily – I have to remove that one screw at the bottom to do it – but I do not think I will need to change it very often and/or quickly – I will find one setting that works the best and then I will want the chair to stay at that setting even when I move it.

It worked reasonably well, so I finished the prototype into a fully usable, albeit not very pretty, piece of furniture.

Making the upholstery was a bugger; I am not very good with stitching. But with some help and advice from my mother, I managed to do most of the work myself. I will only use this indoors for a short time now, before I make a better and prettier final version. Subsequently, I want to use this one in the workshop and outdoors, so I charred all the wood with a blowtorch, and I soaked it in linseed oil. From a distance, it does not look so bad.

As far as comfort goes, the point of this is to ease the strain on the lower back by keeping the hip joints at a higher than 90° angle. It has no back support, so it forces the body’s core muscles to be in tension, similar to sitting on an exercise ball, but without its instability, thus it is not as exhausting, even when sitting for a longer period.

I won’t be sitting on it exclusively, but I think it should be a good addition to my office chair.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 56 – Hoarding Horseradish

This is the very last harvest of the season. I just about managed to do it the very day before we got the first meaningful snow and frost.

It all started with this one patch in our garden, where horseradish grew without being planted there. It showed up when I was a kid, and it is still there, several decades later, despite several attempts at eradication. We did occasionally dig a few roots, but never many – it is a lot of work, and my mother did not know how to preserve them. All attempts failed until she stopped trying.

Horseradish occasionally grows in the meadows surrounding my garden, too, although it never gets very big, because it is being cut down when making hay. But there is one spot in front of my garden where there is a pole marking a gas pipeline. The tractors mow around it, and I only sporadically bother to mow the space between the pole and my garden myself. So a few horseradish plants got pretty big in that patch, and last year, I decided to try to harvest them. I dug out circa 700 g of usable roots. Technically, this was poaching, since roots are not covered by the same law as berries.

I tried dehydrating one half and preserving the other. And both cases were a success.

For dehydrating, I cleaned the roots, cut them into slices, and dried them in the dehydrator at 70°C until they were crisp. I found a scientific study on the internet that postulated this temperature as the best option to get dehydrated roots with minimal discoloration and retaining the maximum taste. I shredded the dried chips in a food mixer, and when I need some, I can re-hydrate a spoonful on a saucer. This white powder does clean sinuses a treat, but I do not recommend ingesting it nasally.

After I processed the roots, I had some offcuts that were not worth much. So I planted them along the edge of my compost pile. In late spring, they sprouted and started to look promising.

And just before the first big frost and snowfall, the huge leaf fans started to die back and yellow. I was considering whether to wait one more year or to harvest them. I decided to harvest them, because whilst I still have some dehydrated horseradish, I ate all that I preserved. Horseradish is an excellent source of vitamin C, and I like it.

The roots were much deeper than I thought they would be after a single year, which is, I guess, one of the reasons why horseradish is not grown commercially very often. It does require some know-how and work to grow roots that are easy-ish to process.

I lack the skill, so my roots were a mess. Still, I harvested circa 900 g of usable mass, and that is not too shabby. This time, I preserved all using the following recipe (which I found on the Czech internet last year)

Ingredients:
300 g clean horseradish roots
50 g vinegar
200 g water
100 g sunflower oil
7 g salt
16 g sugar

Mix/dissolve water and the rest, and cut the horseradish roots into small pieces directly into the solution to prevent browning. Then blend it all together in a food processor/mixer into a white paste. It will never be completely smooth, but the roots should be shredded as small as possible.

That is the end of the original recipe, which was meant for immediate consumption and eventually for storage in the refrigerator for a few days, weeks at the outside. I added one additional step to the recipe for long-term preserving: sterilizing.

Since horseradish is a root vegetable, botulism is a real concern. Even with added salt and vinegar, I wanted to leave nothing to chance, and I sterilized tightly closed jars in a pressure cooker at ca 120°C. Once they cooled, I heated them up again to 80-100°C, and opened-closed them while hot so they form a vacuum seal. It changes the color from pure white to creamy white, but it retains the flavor. Last year’s batch was still perfectly edible after nine months in the cellar, so I think I am safely set up for a year – with all the ingredients added up, I ended up with almost 2 kg of preserved horseradish paste.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 55 – Red Roots

The penultimate harvest of this year – red beets. I dug them out while my back was still aching. Funnily enough, it hurt less whilst doing this than when trying to sit in a chair.

I planted them as a companion plant to the butternut squash on a trellis, and they performed slightly worse than I expected. The squash produced a lot more leaves (and fewer fruits), so the beetroots were shaded a bit too much. So the lesson learned – if I should do this again in the future, I would have to space the pumpkins more.

Still, I got about 1 kg of radish-sized bulbs that could be canned. My mother processed them as follows:

The vegetables:
1 kg of beetroots
100 g carrots
7 medium-sized onions
2 red peppers
100 g butternut pumpkin

The beetroots need to be first cleaned and boiled whole in a pressure cooker for about 30 minutes (bigger roots for longer). Then they can be peeled and cut into equal-sized chunks. The carrots were cut into slices and shortly blanched for 10 minutes in salt water. The onions were cut into slices, the pumpkin and peppers into strips.

The pickling solution:
300 g sugar
2 l water
600 ml vinegar
1 spoon black pepper whole
1/2 spoon allspice
6 cloves
8 bay leaves
3 spoons of mustard seed

All boiled together for 10 minutes, the spices (except the mustard seeds and bay leaves) were put in a tea bag so they can be removed. While the solution was hot, the carrots, onions, and peppers were added and boiled for 1 minute. Then the pumpkins. And while it was hot, it was filled into pre-heated and sterilized jars with twist-on lids. Once it cooled, it formed a vacuum seal.

My mother got the recipe for the pickling solution from one of her former colleagues, and AFAIK, this was the first time she actually used it.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 54 – Coppice Care

Sciatic nerve problems often require exercise, so last week, I tried working in the garden a bit. Carefully, and slowly. And one of the works that I did was planting new hazelnuts in the coppice.

Jays, nutcrackers, and squirrels bury hazelnuts and acorns all over my garden. They do not manage to eat all they bury, so in the following spring a lot of them sprout in random places all ovah. When I am mowing the lawn and spot the tiny trees, I go around them and mark them with a willow rod or some other visible way to leave them be for the rest of the growing season. When planting the veggies, I also often find germinating nuts in the ground, which I carefully relocate to a temporary place for their first summer.

And in the fall, I dig them all out and plant them in the coppice. Hazel is especially valuable in there; it grows reasonably fast, it is good firewood, and the voles leave it alone, for whatever reason.

And this year I had a lot of tiny hazels around the bird feeder, the apple tree, and the apple tree stump. Overall, I found nearly twenty seedlings in my garden during the summer. I hope they fare well and start growing asap, although even under ideal conditions, it will take five to six years before I get any use out of them.

I gained one red-leaved hazel this way, too. It is in the coppice now for a few years and finally starts to grow fast.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 53 – Bountiful Beans

Like I said during the year, runner beans are my favourite crop. They grow well in the marginal soil, and it must be a really bad year indeed for me to not harvest at least a few kg, even when planting them just in one row behind my house. This year, I also grew several common bean varieties, and I bought white runner beans to grow those too. I wrote about the trouble I had with seeds, and that my yellow beans froze after I planted them and ate the rest. That prompted me this year to go about saving seeds differently – from the first pods, those that ripened on the vine, I saved 250 healthiest-looking and biggest seeds from every variant. Only after that I started saving seeds for eating.

The yellow beans are the variety “Konstantin”. The pods are without the vein and papery layer, and the seeds are reasonably large and easy to shell, so it is a variety suitable for both harvesting green pods and dry seeds. This year, I have only had a few plants that survived; thus, I concentrated on harvesting seeds only. I managed to replenish my seed supply for future seasons, and I got a little surplus for eating (ca 300 g).

The white small beans are a variety “Neckarkönigin”, although probably with some admixture of other varieties. I am undecided about whether to grow them in the future or not. I just about managed to get 250 seeds, and they are basically the same as “Konstantin” except the color is white and the seeds are smaller, thus they are slightly more suitable for harvesting pods than seeds.

White runner beans are not in the picture – I only managed to get 50 healthy-ish seeds. Which is a bummer, since I bought 60, which mainly rotted in the ground. I hope to have a better germination rate with these that I have grown myself. I will probably plant all of these next year near the south wall of my house instead of the red ones.

I harvested over 6,5 kg of the red runner beans. Putting aside 250 seeds was no problem, and I might give them a pass next year, completely. The seeds should remain viable for several years in a tightly closed jar (two years are nearly certain).

The black beans are a variety “Meraviglia di Venezia”. They produce large, fleshy, and juicy pods without the paper layer and the vain. They are quite difficult to shell once ripe. Thus, once I was reasonably certain that I would have 250 seeds for the future, I harvested all the remaining pods. To be honest, I had no choice anyway. The weather started to freeze, and it was either that or compost.

These are some of the best and tastiest pods for canning. I harvested 6,5 kg of pods, and we made a pickling solution from these ingredients for them:

4 l water
1 kg sugar
0,5 l vinegar
5 teaspoons of salt

To preserve the pods, they have to be blanched first.

I overdid it slightly on one batch, but fortunately not too much, so they did not disintegrate.

After the pods are blanched, they can be put into pre-heated, sterilized jars, and boiling hot pickling solution can be poured over them. When the lid is closed while hot, they form a vacuum seal, and so far, they have never spoiled, and they last up to three years in a dark, cold cellar without an issue.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 52- Tallying Tomatoes

This is this year’s last bowl of slightly more than 3 kg of tomatoes.

Some of them still need a bit of ripening, but they all should get to a point where they are edible. So I added up all that I harvested this year, and the final number was pleasing – 27 kg.

The harvest was slightly more than last year, but from the greenhouse alone, it was slightly less than last year – last year, I had 25 kg just from the greenhouse. Which is perfectly understandable, because this year, I tried growing bell peppers in one part of the greenhouse instead of tomatoes, and I compensated for it by growing tomatoes outdoors under a shelter. And not only did I manage to shield them from blight, the ripening in buckets was successful more than I expected – virtually all the fruit ripened, and I harvested almost 10 kg of tomatoes this way.

Overall, I am satisfied with this crop. We have enough tomato sauce for pasta and tomato concentrate for pizza for a year.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 49 – Pumpkin Puréé

Making pumpkin purée á la mashed potatoes was my plan from the start of the year. And although my pumpkin harvest was pitiful this year, I did, in the end, get enough butternut pumpkins to try it out. I did not take any pictures, and the recipe is very simple. I handled them pretty much exactly as I would potatoes:

Cut circa 2000 kg butternut pumpkin into small cubes and boil in water for 10 minutes. Decant the water, add 150 g of butter and a spoonful of salt, and crush with a potato masher into a paste. Because pumpkins are less starchy than potatoes, adding milk or water is not needed.

The result looked remarkably like mashed potatoes. It had the same consistency, too. The flavor was very different, though, which is to be expected. We ate it with air-fried fish fingers, and I liked it. I am going to try it tomorrow with spicy sausage.

We were using pumpkins as ersatz potatoes in many foods for years, so this is just another recipe in the repertoire.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 48 – Belated Butternut

This was the first time I was trying to grow butternut pumpkins, so I did not know exactly what to expect. I assumed they would behave similarly to the Hokkaido pumpkins. They did not. They started blooming late, and the first female flower showed up in the last week of August.

I did not want to leave anything to chance, so I pollinated it myself. As I did with all subsequent female flowers that showed up. There were several, all but one in the pumpkin & beetroot patch opposite my greenhouse. The plants in the three sisters system remained stunted, just like corn and Hokkaido pumpkin did. Which leads me to believe that not only weather, but also the compacted soil contributed to those crops failing.

With the plants blooming this late in the summer, I was prepared to write this crop completely off, but the fruits grew reasonably well, despite the weather getting colder.

Just a few days ago, the plants were still going strong. There was slight yellowing of the leaves, but the leaves on top were still fresh green.

The improvised trellis worked well, so I will use that in the future too. However, the plants grew more vigorously than I expected and completely overshadowed the beets. I will have some beets, but it won’t be much. I think that had I planted the three sisters system on this piece of land, it would be successful.

These last two nights we had the first autumn frost. Yesterday morning, the leaves of all the pumpkins wilted, and the plants were completely dead. I have harvested all the fruits at once.

Overall, it was circa 7,5 kg of fruit, with two fruits having circa 1,5 kg each. Those two will probably keep for at least a few days and ripen further indoors. The rest needs to be used up asap. We used 1,5 kg to make tomato-pumpkin sauce, 1 kg to make soup for immediate consumption, and for the rest, we will think of something. I would like to try pumpkin purée à la mashed potatoes.

What did I learn? I need to do my best to get the seeds to germinate earlier. The germination was delayed almost a month, and that made all the difference. I shall try to plant the seeds earlier in the year and use bigger containers, so the plants can grow more freely before I can plant them outdoors. I can try for the three sisters system, but I must do so on my prime soil. I will probably make and write down plans for next year once this season is over.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 47 – Ploughing Problems

There are 59 wild geese in this picture; they flew over my domicile due south this morning. I only snapped the picture with my phone; they move fast, and there wasn’t enough time to get my proper camera.

As far as I can tell, they really were heading dead southwards, not just approximately. I have a weather station, and I measured the orientation of my property several times. I know the north-south axis is slightly offset from my hedge. And subjectively, the path these followed was offset from my hedge at the same angle.

What do wild geese have to do with the title? Wild geese heading south mean autumn is here. And that means tilling the ground. In my garden, no till means usually no harvest. The soil is heavy clay, prone to self-compaction. Even local plants and grasses can struggle.

To help with the process of tilling the soil, I bought a small single-axis tractor ten years ago. Of all the labor-saving devices I’ve ever bought, this is the most controversial one – it cost me over 3,000 €, and it surely hasn’t saved me that much work yet. Mainly, because I am hesitant to use it. It sometimes has trouble starting after prolonged periods of non-use, which is frustrating. This year was no different; in fact, I could not start it at all for over a week.

I am not Otto McNick by any definition, so I was at a complete loss about what to do. The company that sold it to me and used to help in the past when the problem occurred no longer exists, and I could not find any service nearby. And I cannot take the device to a service further off, as it is too big. I contacted a lawn-mower service in a nearby town, but I got no reply. So I had no other option than to start studying the manual for the motor. I found nothing about the problem, except how to change the spark plug. So I did that.

It did not help; the machine still did not start. Then I remembered that the service mechanic said something about water condensate in the carburetor the last time this happened, so I started to search the internet about how to clean the carburetor. I found a short video, I watched it, and today in the morning, I crossed my fingers, then uncrossed them, and started disassembling the carburetor. I wiped the insides with a clean, dry paper towel, I blew every hole through with dry air, and I completely changed the fuel in the tank. Then I assembled everything back, hoping against hope that it worked – and voila, the machine started on the first pull of the cord!

If you haven’t had this experience, I cannot describe to you how good that feels. If you had, you know.

The tractor is not powerful enough to till established grass turf. That is why I planted my potatoes on top of the turf and covered them with soil and moss – to kill the grass, in the hopes that dead grass roots will be easier to till. It worked as expected, except I made one mistake – I left uncovered strips between the three potato patches, where the grass survived. Those did cause me some problems, I will know better next time – I will cover such walkpaths either with cardboard or with black cloth.

An acre is allegedly the amount of land that a man with a plough and a team of oxen can till in a day. It took me almost two hours to till these approximately 25 square meters, so I am woefully inadequate. Reasons for that are several – my tractor is nowhere near as powerful as a team of oxen, this was the first time the ground was being tilled in probably over a century, so I had to go over it three times in different directions, and it is small, thus I lost a lot of time turning around. One of the reasons why old-school farming was done on strips of land, not squares of land, was that once the oxen (tractor) were on a line, they could follow it for a reasonably long time.

History lesson aside, I will have to till my main patch too, I only wait to see if I get some late peas or not. Once the answer to that question is clear, I will start the machine again. Unfortunately, I know already that I won’t have spinach – the second crop either did not grow or bolted too, just like the first one. I probably have to add spinach to the list of crops that don’t do well here.

And lastly, a bit about the time and labor saving.

I hope this means I will be able to get consistent output out of this device in the future. Ploughing a garden patch with this tractor is no less laborious than tilling it with a spade, but it is about ten times quicker. I can do in a few hours work that would otherwise take me several days. If I can now start the device whenever I need it, I might finally get my money’s worth out of it.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 46 – Cthulhu Carrots Conclusion

This was my first time growing carrots, and whilst I could have been happier with the results, it would not be by much. Despite slight rodentous setbacks in the spring and some minor slug trouble throughout, the final result exceeds expectations.

They could be left in the ground and still grow for a bit, but some plants caught powdery mildew on their leaves, so I decided to harvest them all at once. I did not expect that I would fill a wheelbarrow to the extent that it nearly disappears under the leaves.

I rinsed them in the wheelbarrow, I laid them out like rabbits after a hunt, and I took my parents out to admire them.

The seed packets said that this variety can grow up to 17 cm in length. I had many that exceeded that, which I did not expect. And I certainly did not expect a 25 cm long, 7 cm thick, and 835 gram heavy behemoth. This single carrot is more than we usually eat in a fortnight. I have never seen a carrot this big.

As a Terry Pratchett fan, I would feel cheated if my multifurcated carrots did not produce at least some humorous-looking vegetables. I did not get any that look like a man’s, you know… unless you really, really want to see it. But I did get one that looks like a tentacular horror from nightmares. It was not the biggest one, but it was respectably big nevertheless. Apart from that, I had fewer multifurcated roots than I expected, which is a good sign.

Thus, the conclusion to this year’s carrot experiment is a good one. I harvested 13.8 kg of reasonably sized carrot roots, and it would be more if not for the rodents. I haven’t seen any root damaged by carrot flies or wireworms, so pairing the carrots with onions appears to have worked against these particular pests. Planting pre-germinated seeds in paper egg trays worked really well, too, although the carrots were a bit cramped towards the end of the year (no wonder, they got huge). Next year, I will probably tear off individual egg cups from the trays and space them out a tiny bit more, now that I know the roots can get thicker than my wrist.

I sorted out all the small ones, cut them into pieces, and put them into the freezer. I am considering what to do with the big ones. We cannot eat them all now, we cannot freeze them, and I do not have the space to store them fresh for long either. I will probably dehydrate some and can some too. The dehydrators are currently full of plums, but that should be finished tomorrow, or on Monday at the least.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 45 – Terminating Tomatoes

Outdoor temperatures plummeted at the beginning of this week; we went from 28 °C to just 8°C in one day. That is quite the temperature shock, I tell you. And the weather forecast said that we will have temperatures as low as 5°C at night. Anything below 20°C stops tomatoes from ripening, and below 10°C, they effectively start dying and are more likely to rot than to ripen. So I had to dig out my outdoor tomatoes, which are still about 90% green without a trace of red.

There are several ways to deal with this. The easiest way is probably to make chutney, like Giliell mentioned. I do not like green tomato chutney, and I have enough pumpkin mustard to satisfy my condiment needs for a long time. And this is estimated to be 8 kg of tomatoes, which would be way too much for a condiment anyway.

I tried these three methods in those years in which I managed to protect my outdoor tomatoes from blight:

Cut whole clusters, even with a part of the stem, and hang them in the greenhouse/indoors. This works best for indeterminate varieties where the plants are huge and where the whole clusters tend to ripen at once, and when the fruit is at full size and just about to ripen.
Dig out the whole plants, tie them up, and hang them upside down in the greenhouse/indoors. This works best for determinate tomatoes that make small plants, and the fruits are just about to ripen, too.
Dig out the whole plants, cut off all non-fruit-bearing vines and most of the leaves, and put the roots in a bucket with slightly wet but not soggy soil. This works best for determinate tomatoes when the plants are manageably small and the fruit might need a bit more time to start ripening.

And since I grew determinate tomatoes this year, and I am not sure how much time the fruits still need, I used method 3. I had 8 plants, so I put 3 or 2 in a bucket. The soil at this stage only serves as a buffer against the plants losing moisture too quickly, so it does not matter that they are cramped in there. I also had to support the plants with wooden stakes in order to be able to handle them more easily.

These methods are based on my personal experiences, so the results I got over the years might have been just a fluke. I am not inclined to search for scientific studies about any of this. There is not much else I can do anyway, except toss it all. This way, I hope that at least some, if not most, ripen. Last time I did this bucket method, about 50% of the fruit ripened enough to be edible, and I would call that a win this year, too. Tomatoes are expensive.

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