Like every odd-numbered year, I did not buy seeding potatoes. I merely planted leftover potatoes from last year – those that were too small and too green to be edible. They were not as tiny this year as they were in 2023  so I might be getting slightly better results. Hopefully. I planted all three varieties that I was growing last year and this winter we did find some interesting things about them.

First, let’s talk about dehydrating potatoes for long-term storage.

From left to right are the varieties Dali, Esme, and Marabel. As you can see,  two of the three varieties tend to discolor to dark brown, sometimes almost black, when being dehydrated raw. We tried several things we found on the internet – blanching, washing them with water, washing them with vinegar – and none really helped. It is a purely cosmetic thing which does not bother me at all, especially not when used for making potato mushroom soup which turns dark brown from the mushrooms anyway. But since the Dali looks really nice, they could be potentially rehydrated and made into other foods – purree, cakes, etc, where the dark color might be off-putting. So we decided to dehydrate predominantly the Dali and we used the other two for immediate consumption and for making dumplings that can be frozen for later use.

Another interesting thing we found out this winter by accident was actually really surprising. Last year I wrote that the Marabel potatoes sprouted first from the ground and thus were most damaged by late frost. But they seem to be the most resistant to sprouting in the cellar – they remained fresh and unsprouted right until the end of winter when we ate the last of them. And even now when I was planting them, they had barely visible eyes whereas both Dali and Esme had long, leggy sprouts all over them.

I originally planned to bury them in the compost but I changed my plans and decided to try to grow spinach in that place instead, so I had to repeat my experiment from 2023, only without the planting patch being properly prepared over winter. I simply put the potatoes on the lawn in rows of 10 and then put both old and fresh moss and grass clippings between the rows, doing my best to not damage the long sprouts on Esme and Dali (in the picture are Marabel).

I put a little soil on top of the rows to cover the potatoes. After they sprout out of the soil I will put more moss, grass clippings, and soil in the rows again to cover them even more. Overall I made three patches circa 3×3 m, each with 80 potatoes. I will probably have to add some highly diluted mineral fertilizer into the water for these patches in order for them to have an adequate amount of nitrogen since there was not enough grass and way too much moss.

It was a whole day of work and I hope it will pay off. I have no reason to think it won’t. I won’t get as much per potato as I would if I buried them in the compost but I hope to get at least 40 kg of potatoes from each patch even so. We shall see how that turns out.  Right now we have enough dehydrated potatoes (circa 50 glasses) for making soups for a year and maybe more. The freezer contains enough potato dumplings for several months too, so we do not actually need to buy potatoes possibly until the harvest. Except if we want to eat french fries, for which these varieties are not suitable anyway.

There is again a dead animal under the fold at the end of the article, although this time I am not to be blamed for its death.

The spring officially begun and hopefully, this is the last time we switch from astronomical time to summer time. I hope that decision lasts and I won’t have to deal with that nonsense for the rest of my life. Another sign of real spring beginning is that the narcissi started to blossom. I cut a few for my mother and put them in a vase like every year.

Warmer weather spurned me to start working on the strawberries. The raised strawberry bed needed a major overhaul. You have seen it before. For an ideal harvest, I would just pick off some of the excessive plants but that was not possible – the bed was starting to collapse in on itself and the strawberries had nowhere to grow. One reason for that was a loss of organic material due to decomposition – I used substrate rich in organic material to fill the bed originally and that has lost a lot of volume over the years. The second reason was rodents, who dug up holes under the bricks and caused them to tilt inwards. So I dug out all the material and I put some aluminum slabs under the bricks to keep them steady even if a mouse digs under them.

I filled the raised bed with fresh substrate, containing less organic material and more natural soil from my garden. Then I planted back an adequate amount of strawberries and I still had a full bucket left over. With that, I started a new circa 1×4 m bed near my greenhouse and I planted about 12 plants near each of the three freshly planted fruit trees. That way I will have an incentive to water them and I should get some use out of that piece of land even before the fruit trees start to actually bear fruit. In my typical fashion, I forgot to take pictures of any of that.

Just as I was finishing, the weather forecast that the Antarctic vortex is sending cold air our way and the temperatures will plunge below freezing again for two days. So I watered the beds and I covered them with reed stalks to insulate them. Two days of dark will not harm the plants, they will certainly do less harm than frost would.

Here you see on the left the stump of my late apple tree. The stump might sprout, but it also might be completely dead. We shall see. The huge bird’s nest in the middle is the mound made from moss in which I planted two blueberry plants and on which strawberries propagated spontaneously. I only thinned out those strawberries and covered them with reedstalks too. On the right is then the raised strawberry bed and the first stages of my sewage cleaning facility.

I divided my small field into seven vegetable patches by digging ca 25 cm trenches as walkways between them. The patch adjacent to the greenhouse is the one that I planted with strawberries and then too covered with reeds.

Theoretically, I did not need to dig the trenches this deep but I prefer to do it. I get slightly deeper beds that way and need to bend slightly less when working on them afterward and I am not needlessly compacting good fertile soil with my heavy boots. It took me a whole day since my back was not entirely fine and I also had to do more work. As you can see, on the right the trenches go apparently into the lawn. That is not the case, it is the other way around – the lawn grass is encroaching onto the vegetable patches. That was always a problem, therefore about ten years ago I delineated the vegetable patches with concrete grit paving stones. They are completely hidden by the grass and they cannot stop it from going into the beds, but they do provide a hard boundary to which I can work back. Which I could not do with the plow, unfortunately. I had to do that manually, with a pitchfork and spade and a lot of elbow grease. Now all the beds are clean and delineated, I only need to wait until the frost spell is over and I can break up the lumps with an electric hoe and flatten them. After that I can start planting – I will start with onions and carrots and in whatever space is left I will plant beans and peas.

When digging the grass out of the patches, I found this fellow underground. I did not kill it, but I did not put any effort into saving it either. It is technically a pest but they never emerged in my garden in numbers big enough for me to notice them at all. Although there is occasional news about them emerging en masse in warmer regions and decimating fruit trees. With global warming, this could potentially happen here too, I guess. It is something to watch out for as the weather gets warmer. I also found two or three of their grubs but I did not take pictures of those.

And lastly again one dead animal. It is not all pink and cozy in the garden.

[Read more…]

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.

You might think that it is too early to sow anything, and you would be right for about 99% of crops that can be grown in my area. But the weather got warm enough this week to prepare my big greenhouse. It was a lot of work because I worked on the soil significantly.

Firstly I used an old baking tray the whole winter to prepare a lot of charcoal from woodchips made from twigs cut off my hornbeam fence. I filled the tray with wood chips and put it in my house heating oven towards the end of the heating cycle each day. That way the produced wood gas is not wasted because it burns in the oven and is used to heat the house. And I got some fine charcoal at the end. In the picture is the tray filled with spruce board offcuts that I am using now to make coal of larger sizes. Unfortunately, the tray got deformed and cannot be used anymore, but about that soem next time (I made a better receptacle to make charcoal).

I got about 100 l of fine charcoal but I did not make a photo of it. So here is a slightly blurry picture of approximately the same volume of charcoal of bigger sizes. This bigger charcoal will be put in plastic mesh bags and then used in the last filtering stage of my sewage cleaning facility. After it soaks up the phosphorus and nitrogen etc. from my waste water, it will be put into the compost and soil. In the meantime, I soaked the fine charcoal from wood chips in fertilizer and used it to complement the soil in the greenhouse rightaway.

Some people sing the praises of this charcoal (aka biochar), some say it does nothing and it is just the fertilizer that is of use. I have no way of knowing who is right but I did find some scientific articles that got positive results with it and since I can make the charcoal without needlessly adding CO2 to the atmosphere and I need to use charcoal in my sewage cleaner anyway, I decided to give it a shot. It meant though that I had to dig up all the soil in the greenhouse and mix it with the charcoal in a ratio of approximately 9:1, also 10% charcoal by volume.

You can see there were some bigger lumps of charcoal in there, those will probably get broken up over time. The wooden stakes marking the rows of my first sown crop are not very visible, but they are there.

Like I said, it is mostly too early for sowing anything but in my quest to maximize harvest from my garden, I bought seeds of three different varieties of radish. The first one can be sown at the end of February in the greenhouse, which is exactly what I have done. The second one can be sown in March, also in the greenhouse. And the third one will be sown in April outdoors. If it goes well, I should have a few months of steady supply of radishes.

Both greenhouse-grown varieties should be finished at about the time when I can plant my tomatoes and bell peppers in their stead. This way I should get two crops from the same space. I have done this already, albeit with only one variety, so it is not completely new and should work.

I decided to significantly change the way I treat my garden this year. My goal is to raise as much food as I can and that means a wide variety of crops grown in a wide variety of ways. I am planning to write about the endeavor to maximize my edibles from my huge garden and this is the first post in a series about that.

And although I am cash-strapped, I had to begin by buying some LED-lights. Because I want to grow onions and peppers from seeds,

Onions and peppers need a really long time to germinate and grow in size sufficient enough to be planted outdoors. I tried to sow three types of onion but so far only one started to grow, which bums me out. So far I had very little success with onions in my garden, I hope to change that but preliminarily I have little reason for optimism.

After (if) the onions are big enough to move into the greenhouse, I will use these lights to start my tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, and corn indoors too. I do hope that this way I will get plants big enough to resist slug damage later on. Once the plants are big enough, the slugs should not damage them anymore. I also want to try growing these in a novel-ish way, so stay tuned for that.

When I am not growing anything under the lights, I now have a consistent diffuse light for photographing my handmade products, something that I needed for some time by now.