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

Starting plantlets from seed in doors

I started sowing

It is still a bit early for our region, but I have sowed the first vegetables and herbs inside the house. When the wetter is getting better I find it difficult to wait. I have a small indoor greenhouse and had seen by some one else who used empty milk cartons to sow in. I have used a few of those as well. They fit wonderfully on my small windowsills. I don’t have any seed soil, so I used regular plant soil.

Divide a good layer of soil in the trays, sow and cover with a thin or a thicker layer of soil depending on what was sown. Don’t forget to water carefully and mark what was sown where.

I have sown following:

  • Paprika Kapiya Vertus
  • Eggplant Violetta Lunga
  • Flat leaf Parsley
  • Tomato Gardeners Delight
  • Celery Porthos
  • Celery root Wiener Riesen
  • Real Chamomile
  • Chili De Cayenne
  • Pick lettuce
  • Romaine lettuce
  • Tomato Marmande
  • Wilde Rocket
  • Bush Basil
  • Sage

I have sown ratter dense, so that will be tricky to transplant. Unfortunately I do not have the space to do it differently. I hope the wetter will be useful soon, so I can transplant some of the plants outdoors under a cover, but first we will wait and see if anything germinates, which can take up to 3 weeks for some plants. Mean while it is important to make sure the soil will not dry out.

After 3 days the lettuce and the bush basil already have germinated. I took the milk cartons from the window sills to the table beside the small indoor greenhouse, because I think it is to cold at the window. A window is a cold bridge and it is still very cold outside.

We bought some fruit trees

But we where not finished with the preparations for planting jet

Beside fruit trees we also bought 50 pcs of Lavender plants (Lavandula angustifolia) and 50 pcs of ivy (Hedera helix). The Lavender is not only decorative; in future I also want to harvest them. Lavender is not only beautiful in a dry bouquet, but we also want to have the essential oil. In the future I hope to make my own soap again and I would need the essential oil for that. The Ivy is ideal for covering the soil lively to prevent it from drying out and prevent erosion. Also we used to wash our clothing with ivy leaves and we want to go back to that again. Now we wash with wash nuts, but the ivy leaves will be free, after the plants settle and grow, and you can’t get it more regional than from your own garden.

Other than that we bought 10 pcs of raspberry bushes. Some raspberry bushes we already have and the kids loved snacking them directly of the bush. We just had so little harvest that I had to see that every child would get one. That problem should be solved now. Currant bushes we also have a few and where loved to snack from. We will plant all the berry bushes we have in our new plant beds, because we will put a fens around them to keep the dogs out. The dogs destroy everything and pee over everything. We have all male dogs.

We bought 15 pcs apple trees, 15 pcs pear trees and 15 pcs plum trees. We had not finished the preparations on time, but we planted fruit trees in the finished plant beds right away. So put aside the straw, make a hole put in the tree and put a part of the soil back. Than we watered, so the soil would run in every corner and space around the roots. Than fill up the soil around the tree completely and put in a post to secure the tree so the wind will not rock the tree. Only thing left is to divide the straw back. My husband had prepared a lot of posts with a point for all the trees.

We could only plant 12 fruit trees, so we planted all the other once close to each other in 2 plant beds to wait for them to be planted on there final spot. We had built some more plant beds and could only fill 2, because we did not have anymore soil. The trees are in these 2 beds. Hopefully we will get new soil delivered soon and we will go on with this topic a different time.

Visiting Sheep lambs / spring cleaning birds nests

Visiting a friend with a lot of sheep and lambs

We visited a friend who sells sheep cheese and sheep meat. He makes the cheese from the milk of his own sheep, so he has a lot of sheep with a lot of lambs. The lambs are so adorable. The children loved looking at them, how they bounced around and drank at there mother. I am really looking forward to having our own sheep, and of course lambs every year, again. Maybe in 2 years that could be the case.

Birds nests

I love it when I can hear the first birds singing again in the winter. For me that means the biggest and darkest part of winter is over and spring can not be long. So it was high time to clean out the births nests we had hung up 2 years ago. We have 3 births hotels for 3 nests of which the first nest in the first hotel was not used and the last nest in the last hotel was not used and the wooden shoe was not used. So we cleaned out 9 nests and it was high time because the space was filled out, because every time the birds breed they will build a new nest on top of the old one. Some nests where build as we typically expect a births nest, open to the top. We also found a nest like a ball with a hole on the side.

Beside the births nests we hung up, the birds also nest in the wall above. These are hollow stones with damage here and there leaving enough space for the birds to go in and out. Since the wall is southeast facing it will warm up nicely when the sun shines. We only have sparrows nesting here.

To build new nests the birds will find enough material here, but what they also love to use is dogs hair. Since one of our dogs needed to be brushed, I provided some nest material. The next day there is hardly anything left of the dogs hair.

Many of the nesting possibility’s are claimed already, so I hope there will be a lot of new birds this year. We love watching the young birds learning to fly.