I was so happy this spring. There where little peaches on our peach tree for the first time since we planted the tree, but …
the little peaches are all drying in and falling off. A part of the leaves also look wilted. Was it the late frost, or does this tree have another problem? I don’t know.
Trying to save the blueberries with a thick layer of leaves
My Blueberry bushes looked miserable last year and they gave only a handful of fruit. When we bought them the year before they where packed with fruit, so there must be a reason the blueberry bushes are not very happy.
One problem could be lack of water. We did not water them last growing season. Although the soil is very moisture retaining, there could have been too little moisture.
Another problem could have been the fact that they where overgrown last spring. We just timely did not manage to maintain the berry garden.
Another problem could be that the soil is not acidic enough. An indication for that are the leaves, which are not a nice bright green, but tend to a slightly yellower green. This could indicate that the ph-level is not to there liking.
To improve the berry garden we mowed the grass and weeds short and divided a thick layer of leaves over the entire patch. Obviously it will take some time for the leaves to decompose and for the ph-level to change, but the thick layer of leaves will also retain moisture much better and will keep the weed pressure down. This way we tackle 3 problems at once.
After a few weeks some weeds still came trough, so we will have to pull these out and improve the mulch layer. Since we do not have any more leaves we will use woodchips for that.
We interplant the blueberries with currants after clearing and removing some of the raised beds from our garden 2. That might have been a bad idea, but at the moment we do not have a suitable place from them. We are planning to expand our berry garden, but we have to get rid of all of the couch grass and the weeds there first. After we succeed with that we will relocate the currant bushes to give the blueberry bushes there needed space back.
Here are some impressions taken on 2 different dates:
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.
Whit this the garden season came to an end here.
Beautiful Chaos 