Natural gardening adventures
With a first year of gardening also comes a first year of (attempted) seed saving. This year, I tried to save seed from three plants: cucumbers, chillies and edamame. I'd like to show you more in-depth how I tried to save the cucumber seeds, as they required a few more steps than the other two.…
Even in this bad summer, I was able to harvest some things. Let's look at what came out of our garden this summer besides chillies! First up, we had SO many cucumbers. I grew both Morden Early and Richmond Green Apple. True to its name, the Morden Early started producing earlier than the RGA. I…
You may remember I was growing a few chillies this year. After a few updates at the start of the year, I didn't really let you know how they did in practice! I'm very fortunate that I got a significant harvest from most of them, with a noticeable exception... let's have a look! These are…
It's been a while since I posted something about the garden here. I'll admit, partially it was because I'm disappointed about how little I've accomplished this year. What a terrible summer! Still, at least some of the plants we put in the garden are thriving and even at this late stage of the year, there…
You may have noticed that I haven't posted anything for months, even though summer should be the season where most is happening in the garden. This is for a number of reasons, as you will see below. However, I hope to be getting back into the swing of things in the second half of September!…
Continue reading ➞ The worst, wettest summer ever (literally)
The good thing about having a family that is also really into gardening, is that you get all sorts of plants for free! Over the past two months, my parents travelled down twice to visit us and their car was filled with plants taken from their own and my sister's gardens, or grown from cuttings…
This year, I sowed my chillies between February 23 and March 14. Let's have a look today, two or three months on, to see how they've been getting on in this cold, wet spring, before we pot them on! As discussed previously, I lost a lot of chillies this year due to circumstances and, admittedly,…
Since we now have a house, we also have a lawn. A big lawn. A VERY big lawn. And lawns need to be mowed - right? Overe here, there are many calls for people to leave their lawns unmowed in April or May. This is because Taraxacum officinale, otherwise known as the common dandelion ('paardenbloem'…
It's been a month and a half since I posted here. Where has time gone?! I know where time has gone: first, there was a surgery and the accompanying recovery (don't worry, I'm fine!) and shortly thereafter, we moved and had to get our house up to a livable standard. So yes, that means we…
My house is now filled with seedlings and my husband is starting to despair. It's all worth it though, for the joy of seeing those little plants spring to life! And of course, the prospect of having many lovely vegetables and chillies this summer. Let's see how they're doing this week! Before we continue, allow…
Peppers & Poppies 