My Auntie’s Garden – Part 6 – Even More Small Flowers

I am back from the holiday with my friends from the university but unfortunately, I did not bring back any pretty pictures. There were no pretty sceneries, cute animals, or interesting flowers. There was a lot of talking since we did have some catching up to do – we did not meet for over two years, even more with some.

But there are still some more pictures from my aunt’s garden so there will be several more posts of that. I am very busy in my own garden right now too so I do not have much time to write.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

My Auntie’s Garden – Part 3 – Pansies

The Czech name for these beauties is “maceška” which is a diminutive form of the word “macecha” (stepmother). Don’t ask me why, I have no clue. These were not grown in the rock garden itself, they are in old ceramics throughs near the steps into the house.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

My Auntie’s Garden – Part 2 – Tulips

Not the biggest collection imaginable, but the strategically put tulips here and there resulted in quite a few various pictures.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

My Auntie’s Garden – Part 1 – Introduction

Very rarely do I have an opportunity to visit my favorite aunt in the spring when her rock garden is in full bloom, so today year when I got lucky I took a ton of pictures. I will post them piecemeal over a non-specified period of time.

This is the outside view of her house and the garden. You can already see the multitude of shapes and colors.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And to start things first a picture of a small pond with water lilies. They are not blooming yet, so just a little anecdote to amuse you: When I was a little kid, I liked to play in this garden by running and jumping on the rocks. My aunt did not mid as long as I did not damage any plants, which I somehow managed. But she did warn me to not do it near the pond because I could fall in it. So of course I ignored that instruction and one summer day I did indeed fall into the pond, butt first. There was laughing and Itoldyousoing on my aunt’s part and wailing and gnashing of teef on my part. Luckily I did not hurt my self nor the water lillies.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Akin All Avo

This Wednesday and Thursday the weather was warm enough to plant pohtatohes. These are the fruits of mah lay-bour:

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

In the top left corner, you can see my sewage cleaning facility, specifically, its last two stages, the gravel-reed-bed where the water is further cleaned after the anaerobic tank and the seeping pond where it seeps into the ground around the edges. The reeds grew especially big last year with some stalks exceeding 3 m in height and 1 cm in thickness, which is normally unheard of at my elevation. Hooray for global warming, I guess. Mowing them with a scythe was an extreme p.i.a.

You can also see the pollarded willow trees around the pond that are due for firewood harvest next winter, but for years I did not know what to do with the reeds so they just rotted slowly on the compost. Two years ago I tried to put them directly on top of planted potatoes before they get covered with dirt. And it worked well, it lightened up the heavy clay significantly that year and I had the biggest haul of potatoes from that patch that I ever got – over 200 kg. We had even trouble to give the taters away because of the Covid travel restrictions, so we have tried some ways to preserve them for longer storage. Which worked well, especially dried chips for soups – we have those still and they work great in combo with dried mushrooms.

Last year there were no potatoes but peas, beans, maize, and pumpkins, so the soil can recover somewhat. It did not yield 200 kg of edibles of course, but we got a few dinners out of it. This year it is potatoes again.

So I am trying to replicate the success. On the vegetable patch, you can now see nine full and two very short rows filled with shredded reed stalks. In the next days, they will be slowly covered with dirt to form mounds for the tubers to grow. Inorganic fertilizer was added over the winter in the form of several buckets of ash from the house-heating stove. Some organic fertilizer has been added now with these reed stalks and more will be added over the year in the form of mown grass and raked moss. I do hope the weather won’t be too dry, but the sewage cleaning facility should help significantly if it is, and it adds some nitrogen too since the system is not as effective at cleaning ammonia as it should.

A whole cycle from poop to food in one garden.

Today I wanted to work on knife sheaths, but I am aching all over and it is probably not just from the work. I have a slightly elevated temperature and a bit of sore throat and a mild dry cough. The weather was reasonably warm, but not really warm, so I guess I caught a bit of chill and now some strep is trying to get me. I do hope to be able to work tomorrow, I have a commission due in May and although I still have enough time, finishing sooner is always better than later.

Bonsai Tree – I Still Do Not Understand You My Persimmon

Previous post.

Last year my Persimmon tree did not branch out and it also took a veeery long time to shed leaves. When it did shed the leaves, I decided to overwinter it in a cooler, darker spot than last year in the hope that I will get better control over when it starts to grow. I did not. Saturday I noticed that it has started to sprout new twigs. That is very early and very inconvenient because I had no potting substrate prepared and due to the extreme weather I could not prepare any for a few days. But today I finally got around to replanting the tree.

Maybe what keeps this tree dormant is not only cold but relative dryness and cold? I do not know. It has wintered, it has survived, but I still have no clue whatsoever what is optimal for it where I live.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

Here you can see it in a bucket of water when I am washing out old substrate from the roots. The roots looked very healthy and were not overgrown. I might not need to re-plant the tree every year.

As you can see. last year there has only grown one twig, very upright and very long. And it did not start to grow from the apical bud right below the cut, but from one a bit lower. That has made the trunk shape in that place a bit awkward. Luckily this spring the tree started to branch out at the main stem, from the buds under the previous year’s cut. Go figure.

I have removed the whole of last year’s growth on the main stem and I did not touch the secondary stem at all. I will leave the secondary stem to grow this year uninterrupted. that should make it stronger and thicker. And next year I will cut it back a lot. On the main stem now are two budding twigs which I hope will become a suitable base for a nice crown.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

Here it is replanted, being watered for the first time in the new substrate.

I made a cutting from the top of last year’s growth where the twig was soft and not very woody yet, I slathered some root stimulator on the wound and put the twig in water to find out if this plant can be propagated this way. Putting a cutting directly in water is the simplest way, but not all trees take root this way – some are more finicky in this regard. We shall see, the worst-case scenario is no harm, the best-case scenario is another persimmon to play with.

I Got Nuts

Last year I made a tool to pick up walnuts, but I had no opportunity to really use it. Just when the tree was in full bloom, late frost came and destroyed everything. Well, at least the tree got some rest and it is not like we are wanting walnuts – we still did not eat all we had.

And this year’s humid and cold-ish summer seemed to agree with the tree mightily. You can try and count the nuts in this picture but it would not be easy for they are difficult to spot and there are many, many, many.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And this picture was taken after we already have several kilos of shelled and peeled fresh walnuts in the freezer, several kilos drying in their shells for long-term storage, and giving several hundred grams of low-quality ones to birds in the feeder each day. Which I suspect that a squirrel takest, for I doubt tits make them disappear this quickly.

So these last few days I go twice a day with the ladle and pick the nuts. The first that fall still have some green stuff on them (as seen in the picture) and are usually of lower quality.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The tool works like a charm. No aching back and legs, no effort. I can easily scoop any nuts that fall in the nettle patch, or in the raspberries, or on the tarpaulin covering pool at the end of the sewage cleaning facility. After I pick them, my father cleans them, and in the evening when watching TV he and my mother crack and sort and peel them.

Yesterday most of these mixed-quality nuts were already down and what is falling now are mostly those where the husk cracks on the tree so the nut falls first and the husk eventually follows, so no additional cleaning is necessary. From experience, these are usually of a higher quality and when dried and stored properly, they last for years in their shells. However, I am a bit at a loss as to what to do with them. I no longer have colleagues to whom I could try and sell the excess, and it seems I will have more than enough to satisfy the whole family’s needs for years. Like I said, we still haven’t eaten all we had from two years ago.

I wish potatoes grew this way.

Garden update: Harvest is upon us

Autumn is sneaking in, which means that it will soon be time to say goodbye to the lush colours of the garden. But before we leave for winter, things are still growing.

Butternut squash on a planting stone

©Giliell, all rights reserved

There are finally some butternut squash. they’re pretty late, but this is the second one we ate and there’s a couple more. My corn (not pictured) was a mixed success. While the regular sweetcorn was ok (but I only had four stalks), the black popcorn maize put out cobs way too late and didn’t grow tall either. I doubt that it will still ripen and I’m a bit at loss as to why that happened. Can’t be the soil or anything I did, since both varieties were planted next to each other…

I will have way more chilis than anybody can wish for…

Orange chili on a plant

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Somebody must have told this one a dirty joke, it’s turning red.

And last but not least: asters. They’re about the last food the bees get in autumn and aren’t they just amazing?

pink/purple aster with lots of buds

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Bonsai Tree – Taking Things Slow

Previous post.

My persimmon tree got me worried this spring again. It looked perfectly healthy when I was repotting it, but I had to trim a lot of roots in order to promote good growth – the main root was a bit too much as a carrot. But it had plenty of lateral roots too, so I did not think cutting it will be a problem. I have also trimmed most of the last years’ growth in order to promote the tree to branch out a bit.

The roots did not support splitting the plant into two, but that is not a problem, I will be happy to have bonsai with two trunks. But the tree, again, did stubbornly did not grow. Outdoors was everything green already and growing like mad, and this one did nothing. It was indoors the whole time, so I do not understand how it could be so heavily influenced by weather (this spring was delayed by more than a month), but possibly it was.

I was fretting and checking the tree regularly. Both twigs were still springy and the bark was fresh-looking, there were no obvious signs of the tree dying. Just no growth.

Last week I have put the tree in the greenhouse, in the hope that the warmth and high humidity will wake it up already. And it might have worked.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Well, the tree is growing, but it seems unwilling to branch out. Maybe persimmons are plants with strong apical dominance. We shall see whether I will persuade it to branch out or not.

On the right, you see a new addition to my plants collection, a mango grown from seed. My aunt gave me mango fruit in the fall, which I, unfortunately, could not eat because I was seriously revolted by the smell. It was not spoiled, it just smelled unpleasant to me, like raw peaches (to which I am allergic). At least my parents found the smell pleasant and the taste too. And the stone went straight into substrate afterward. It looks promising and might make a passable bonsai too. And it seems to grow much faster than the persimmon since it is a tropical plant and does not have a real need for wintering.

Baby, it’s cold outside

In one of Pratchett’s best novels, Nightwatch, Sam Vimes travels back in time and takes part in the “Glorious Revolution” (twice, actually), with its motto of Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard Boiled Egg, and its symbol of lilac in bloom, which happens on the 25th of April. I remember Caine being very fond of that day, posting pics of lilac. For me, living in a place where spring comes earlier than North Dakota and wherever Pratchett lived in the UK, by that time, the lilac had already bloomed, taking its sweet perfume with it.

Except this year, with its extraordinarily cold April. This year, the lilac has not yet dared to open its flowers.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Most nights still had freezing temperatures and lots of plants are four weeks behind their usual schedule, which creates a problem for your dedicated hobby gardener: I planted the seeds according to the usual timeline, and most beds are also ready, only that it’s way too cold to plant anything outside:

©Giliell, all rights reserved The garden as o two weeks ago. The lower terraces are ready for planting, but the weather isn’t.

This means everything is still inside, although I usually carry about 50 plants outside in the morning and carry them back inside in the evening. Say hello to the cocktail tomatoes.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

I’m also running out of pots, because most of them have now been replanted three times and had to ask my mum for planting pots. What I really couldn’t keep inside for longer is the squash, so I planted it outside, hoping it would survive. By now, none of the plants look happy, some of them also don’t look alive:

©Giliell, all rights reserved

I can only hope that it will regrow those leaves, otherwise the squash will be entirely shop bought this season. As they were last year, when all my plants insisted on having male flowers only.

In the meantime I’m taking joy in the growth of my corn. Intellectually I knew that in order to get that high, it had to grow like mad, but knowing and seeing are two different things.

The two upper terraces in the garden will become “milpa” beds, also known as the “three sisters planting”, an old central American planting technique where you plant corn, beans and squash in the same area (hopefully the squash will survive…). The corn provides stability for the beans to grow on, the beans provide nutrition for the ground, and the squash protect the soil from drying out and being washed away. This was the little one’s idea and I must say, the idea of fresh corn on the cob is intriguing. So, cross your fingers for warmer weather and surviving squash (also the fucking slugs have been at it already. There’s a whole garden for them to eat, they can’t tell me they need to eat my squash).

Tiny Vegetable Patch Inspectors

The inspectors are tiny, not the vegetable patch. That is quite huge (over 40 square meters). It took me 1 hour to plow it all and that knocked me out for two days. Now I am breaking the dirt lumps and making the beds for the veggies which I expect to keep me busy for a week. Last year we had only one huge patch with potatoes, this year it will be split into several small ones for peas, onions, beans, and cucumbers.

And today when I had my lunch break, several small birds came to inspect my handiwork and feast on earthworms and insects brought to the surface – the redstarts are back, a sure sign that spring has really begun. These birds never come to the feeder, they are strict insectivores and they really enjoy the vegetable patches after the rain or when the surface is disturbed.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

I assume that these are all black redstarts Phoenicurus ochruros, because those I usually see around here. But there might be some common redstarts Phoenicurus phoenicurus among these four pictures this time or even all of them. These are all females and those are hard to distinguish, species-wise, for me. Today was one of the rare instances when I have also seen male common redstart, but he, unfortunately, whooshed before I got him into focus.