Gardening – Page 40 – Beautiful Chaos

Trying something new: A Straw Bed

Since we have no usable soil on our property and I have seen and read about building up soil and mulching with straw or hay we have decided to try something new.

**Place for straw bed. Rubble with blown in sediment**

Our hay is reserved for feeding the animals, since we have a limited amount of it. Straw on the other hand we have plenty, so we have build up our bed with straw.

We have spread a thick layer of straw on the ground which should keep the moisture from draining into the ground. We are building this straw bed on old rubble.

**Straw layer, compost soil layer and the start of the top straw layer**

On the straw comes a layer of compost soil and on top comes another thick layer of straw.

**Half way building up the straw bed with the 3 layers**

Unfortunately we did not get the compost soil until May. In the best case such a bed is build in the fall, so the bed has time to get thoroughly wet and the straw below has the chance to start decompose.

I planted tomatoes, squash, cucumber and peppers. For weeks I was very disappointed that nothing happened. The plants did not die, but they did not grow either.

**Tomatoes and squash plants. Cucumbers and chillies are in the back**

After about 2 months all of a sudden the plants started to grow and they grew well. Of course it being already mid summer we had very little harvest from this bed. A few cucumbers and some chillies is all.

**Cucumber and the beginning of a squash**

The squash and tomatoes did not have the time to cure. Here are some pictures from the beginning of October just before the first night frost came.

All in all it was a shame we did not build this bed in the fall, but I have high expectations for next year.

Red beets harvest and soup making

A simple soup made out of our own red beets

After a light night frost we started harvesting all of our red beets before the frost makes them useless. We love our red beets as a soup. Even our children eat this soup well, so I thought to shear the simple way I make this soup with you.

All you need are some red beets, an onion, a few garlic cloves, beef broth, a cup of cream and some dill.

Cut the red beets, onion and garlic cloves into cubes and put the vegetables into a cooking pan.

Ad the beef broth so that the vegetables are just submerged.

Bring everything to a boil and simmer for about 15-20 min. until the red beets are softened.

Now blend everything with a hand blender to the consistency you like and ad the cream and the dill to your taste and liking.

Enjoy

I made a bigger batch so after blending I put half in jars to freeze for a later meal

It is harvest time

And we have made ourselves a lot of work in the garden this year.

We have no useable soil on our property, so we have to work with raised beds and hillbeds in order to grow our vegetables.

This means a lot of work before we can even start with gardening.

As you can see on the picture we also mulch all our beds. Our location is ratter warm and dry, so this way of gardening is beneficial to keep the moisture in the soil.

Unfortunately this year was no good for the tomatoes. We only harvested a few handfuls of so many tomatoplants we had started from seed in the winter.

On the other hand we had an abundance of zucchini, even a few broccoli en a bunch of onions.

**Broccoli, Zucchini, Zucchinisoup and elderberry jelly**

A few red cabbages have been turned into sauerkraut and kimchi. And I hope I find the time to harvest and process the rest of the cabbage before the caterpillars eat them all.

The paprika was getting late to ripe due to the cold wetter now and then. So we had to harvest them green otherwise the paprika went bad before turning red completely.

Since we do not like the taste of green paprika I am fermenting and pickling them. Also the chilies are getting fermented.

**Paprika and Chilli pickled and fermenting**

We are so lucky to have a great potato yield. We had a number of different varieties. One did better as the other. Our favorite is the potato “Aromata” which tastes very good and gave us the best yield with a lot of very big potatoes.