Category: Garden

In this category you will find everything that is growing and living outside in the garden, like growing vegetables and fruit and raising animals for there meat and chickens for eggs

Planting the last fruit trees

And also planting the lavender and Ivy plants

Finally I found the time to plant the lavender and Ivy plants. With the help of our children it did not take so much time at all. With every fruit tree we planted in our new beds we plant 3 Lavender and 2 Ivy plants, as far as we have plants for that. So take aside the straw, plant the plants, and put back the straw without covering the new plants. We did not have enough plants for every tree, but we will breed new plants out of these the coming years our selves. I am just going to wait for these plants to settle and grow first.

Our field with the new beds was not big enough for all of the fruit trees, so we planted 2 more rows some where else on out property. We still have to put straw around them. With one row we put an electric fence around the trees so the dogs can’t get to them, but we did not have enough fencing for the other row. Luckily we have noticed that the dogs do not bite on these trees, they are big enough already, so we can take the electrical fence down again. I need this fencing for my straw bed, which is getting a thick layer of hay this year.

Sowed much to early

So we ate microgreens for the first time

Almost everything I have sown has germinated. Only the Parsley and the Paprika Kapiya Vertus did not germinated jet. Most of the plantlets are still small and luckily have time before they need to be repotted. In the Tiny House I do not have much space for plants.

Only the pick lettuce, the romaine lettuce and the Bush Basil germinated very well and should be planted. Where we live it is still much to cold outside to be planting lettuce, even when covering. So I have decided to try them as Microgreens, 11 days after sowing. I cut them of so we would not eat any soil.

After washing I made it with some good vinegar. This tasted delicious and we are eager for more.

So I will be sowing some lettuce for Microgreens again soon. Only I will sow them in a separate container with only some paper towels on the bottom to keep the moisture in, so we can also eat the rootlets without having all the soil on them.

Building stone beds

Heat retaining stone beds for heat-loving plants

We hat a job working in someone’s garden where we should remove larger and smaller boulders. Of course we took these boulders home with us and made 2 beautiful plant beds with these stones. We used our wheel loader to position the larger boulders. Other than that it is manual work. A plant bed out of boulders is heavy and exhausting, but the result is worth the effort.

To start with my husband positioned the larger stones, after that we filled out the spaces in between with the smaller stones. Than what’s left is filling up the bed with soil, spreading out the soil and finished is the plant bed.

We had a lot of smaller boulders left, so we build another smaller plant bed. To get a curtain height it needs a broad base and then all that is left to do is stack the stones until all have been used. Again fill up with soil, spreading out the soil and finished is the plant bed.

The stones retain the heat of the sun and keep the temperature at night a little higher. I hope to have better results with tomatoes and eggplants in the larger stone bed compared to the normal beds with wood around them. First I am going to use the stone bed for early sowing under cover. Tomatoes and eggplants can’t be planted outside until the middle of Mai any how.