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
Oh no, not again. Lots of dried little fruits and the good looking ones have a little hole in them.
The season started of so wonderful with most of the fruit trees blossoming beautifully and after a few weeks we can see lots of fruit starting to form. We always have a lot of the caterpillars of the Apple tree spider moth in our apple trees, so we checked and collected them of our smaller apple trees as much as possible. The bigger apple trees can cope with them and they are too high and there are too many to collect them anyway. In the middle of this job we noticed dried in fruits on our plum trees. Last year the plum moth maggots cost us almost all of our plum fruit and it looks like this year will be no different. We collected all of the dried in fruit and all of the fruit with a hole in it we could find, but will it be enough…
I do hope nature will find a balance soon. I do not mind sharing our produce with nature, but I would like to harvest some of it too.
Pulling out large weeds (and finding some surprises), harvesting potatoes, cucumbers and chilli’s
This garden bed is in a protected corner of our garden 4, facing south with willow trees in the back to catch and hold the warmth of the sun. Therefore it is ideal for growing cucumbers and chilli’s, but first we need to weed, again (as we had to in previous years).
As you can see in the picture the “weeds” where hip high for our children, who where very helpful in pulling out the “weeds” and looking for little treasures (like the self seeded sunflower).
They had a lot of fun, especially after discovering a self seeded nasturtium.
After spreading manure and rotary tilling this garden bed in early spring, the Humphrey has spread like creasy, so we have an entire row of this growing here now. We worked our way around this with the weeding and found a lot of potatoes growing around the Humphrey. Obviously we left them for harvesting later.
This weeding was done beginning of June and about 2 weeks later we put the cucumbers in.
Next to the cucumbers we planted a block of chilli’s we had extra from the greenhouse and after weeding frequently we started the potato harvest beginning of August.
We also harvested some nice pickling cucumbers and lots of big cucumbers for fresh eating. The big fresh eating cucumbers produced very well, better then in the greenhouse. The pickling cucumbers did not produce so much in this garden bed. They did better in the greenhouse.
The leaves of the cucumber plants started turning yellow and then brown and dry out completely. After reading about cucumbers in the internet I started cutting of all of the leaves that where not beautiful green.
This was middle of August and there was not much left of the plants.
Unfortunately, in the second half of August, the nice wetter turned colder and very wet and the cucumbers started rotting on its vines.
September we where able to harvest some nice Chilli’s. Although they did not have enough time to turn red, but that’s ok.
In preparation of the garden season we divided a few loads of cow manure over the compost beds in the winter and worked that in with the rotary tiller. In 2024 the wetter was “against” us and we planted potatoes no sooner then early Mai. We planted a few rows of potatoes on one side of the larger growing area and they where already sprouting.
After a proper watering we covered the growing area with a good layer of hay to keep the moisture in.
End of May we planted a bunch of corn seedlings we grew our selves.
We also sowed a lot of green manure over the entire patch. The idea was that the green manure would suppress the “weeds”, improve the soil and prevent the soil from drying out in the summer heat.
Beginning of July the garden patch looked like this.
Pretty chaotic, but the potatoes where growing good and even a pumpkin grew well. We also had planted some zucchini somewhere in this chaos. It took them a while to take of, but once they settled they produced nicely. After the green manure plants where done blooming and fell over, we where even able to find the plants and harvest the zucchini’s.
Underneath all of that chaos the potatoes did surprisingly well. We did have a ratter big Colorado beetle pressure, but where we could reach we collected all of the larvae and beetles off. The plants where not completely eaten and I think the damage wasn’t too bad.
At least we where able to dig up a nice potato harvest with a lot of small to medium sized potatoes and also some bigger potatoes. I think the problem with the smaller potatoes is that we planted them a little to close together. That is something we will have to pay attention to this year.
Beside the Colorado beetle, the garden patches where filled with life which gives hope that nature will provide a healthy balance between pests and predators.
And then there was the corn. We planted the corn in a big block and sowed some runner beans on a few spots between the corn.
The corn did well and we harvested a lot of corn cobs, let them dry and took the cornels off. I ground them to flower and backed an American cornbread. Unfortunately we did not like the taste of it, so next year I will grow sweet corn instead of a flower corn (I just liked the colour so much).
I found that the runner beans influenced the growth of the corn stalks it was climbing in negatively, but with planting enough corn that is no big deal. What we will have to do differently this year is leaving more space in between the rows of the corn, to make it more easily to harvest the runner beans, since we could not really reach them without damaging the corn. Also we will sow the runner beans along the outside of the corn patch instead of one or two rows inwards. This will also make it more easily to reach for the beans while harvesting.
To close the season, my husband flail mowed both patches end of September. After that he spread a good load of sand over the soil, since we felt that the soil was way to heavy, and he rotary tilled it in. After sowing both patches with green manure, so the soil would not be bare over winter, we planted a block with Jerusalem artichoke that came free from a raised bed we removed in our garden 2.
The green manure came up, but did not grow much anymore, since it already was to cold, but that is no problem. The main thing is that the soil is somewhat protected over winter.
Finishing this post with some flower pictures from these patches
Beautiful Chaos 