Our garden season 2024 was all about gardening the “wild” way and I think my approach about gardening the “wild” way was a little to literal. In the early stage of the plant growth I am not always sure what plant it is, so I let everything just grow up to the point where I was overwhelmed and did not know where to start in finding the plants I actually wanted to grow.
This is how things can end up looking like.
Middle auf August I harvested the potatoes in this hügelbed. It was difficult finding the plants and it was difficult to harvest because of all of the roots of all the other plants. While harvesting we “cleaned” most of the hügelbed by pulling out most of the weeds. We left most of the sunflowers for the birds, which have been eating on the sunflower seeds already. One important thing we have to note for the future is no sunflowers this close with the potatoes, since the potatoes close to the sunflowers where so much smaller as to the once further away from the sunflowers.
I the other garden beds there where a lot of self sown red beets and amaranth, which was nice. Beginning of July we did a big clean up round with these hügelbeds, since the weeds also had taken over here. In two hügelbeds we freed the tomato plants and in the other hügelbed we found self set potato plants ready for harvest, some pumpkin plants and some flowers I had sown.
In this last mentioned hügelbed I had sown a lot of different things directly, but it took until early July before things started to sprout and grow. For the pumpkins this was too late. They did not give a harvest before fall came, since the wetter turned to cold for the pumpkins to ripen. Some basil, dill, nasturtium and other annual flowers did well. With our climate I, unfortunately, will have to pre-cultivate a lot of plants, unless we have a very warm and early spring. Well that means, keep a close eye on the wetter.
After the clean up I also sowed some carrots, spring onions and red beets. Obviously this was way too late, but the kid’s loved eating the small carrots in the fall anyway. I will relocate and plant out the spring onions with some spacing this spring to use this year.
I had mentioned the blight struck tomato plants in a post last year. After I cut back everything that was diseased we got some nicer and dryer wetter and the tomato plants did give a harvest after all, but I did need to keep a close watch on them and cut diseased parts back now and then. Since the tomatoes did turn out ok, we will be growing tomatoes again, but I will start them a little later in the greenhouse and I will plant them in a different, airier garden bed.
End of September caterpillars started eating on the nasturtiums, but they where only on this plant.
Just some impressions:
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Beautiful Chaos 