In the back yard of the two apartment house in which my in-laws occupy one apartment and my wife and I another, we have a rather spacious garden. I believe it was two years ago, that we first considered giving growing our own veggies an honest try. My sister-in-law lives in the house next door to us and the father of my brother-in-law (Fritz) in the house on the other side of our building. So we are all bunched up together in a cozy family neighborhood, so to speak. In this update I want to show you how we planted our garden for this season.
First steps
That first year we were improvising, really. Fritz prepared the garden bed for us, even though I was ready to give that a go myself, though in all fairness the man is over 80 years old and still fit like a bull. We gathered on a saturday morning and drove down to the local garden center, where we bought tomato plants, zucchini, pumpkin, paprika, carrots and a whole bunch of salads. That same day we carefully planted our seedlings in the garden and felt that warm feeling you get when you do something really productive.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and our tomato plants were ginormous, running wild and getting tangled in each other, the three zucchini plants spread through half the garden and were producing food at a rate faster than we could eat them, while half the salads were eaten by either our chickens or an underground pest. But the produce that we did managed to grow that first year was absolutely fantastic. Nothing you buy from a supermarket comes close as far as taste goes. Maybe it’s also a mind thing, because it is our produce, but who cares.
Last year we learned a bit from our first attempt. Spacing the tomato plants a bit further apart, dropping the number of zucchini plants from three to two and increasing the number of salad seedlings, just to counteract the amount that will die in the weeks to come. We were successful! Tomatoes grew, even though with more space they also grew wider, so we ended up having the same mess as the year before, BUT the tomatoes were still as awesome as before. All in all another successful summer for our amateur gardening attempts.
Fast forward to 2017
This year though, we are approaching it a tad differently. Because tomatoes were the best of our produce we planted 17 plants and I intend to prune them, so they don’t get tangled and wild. Note to self, gotta figure out how exactly I have to go about it. We have plenty of green salads, some zucchini, cucumbers and herbs, and as an experiment potatoes also. Let’s see how that works out. This year I was in charge of preparing the garden bed, because Fritz wasn’t feeling well. I would say I was rather successful, don’t you think?
Here’s the process in pictures:
You can see the machine I used to dig up the ground in the first picture. The ground was quite dry, so it took quite a bit of effort to keep the machine steady and get the job done.
Once I softened the ground up I still had to rake in the left over grass laying on top of the bed.
Smooth and watered and ready for the planting the following day, also, notice the feline overseer juding from the fringes.
All planted and ready to grow! Please excuse the Instagram Story format. I thought it funny. 😃
It’s been two weeks since we planted the garden and the tomatoes are steadily growing, they became to big for the mini sticks they came with. Now they have some proper poles to keep them upright and steady. Some salad seedlings have already gone missing, but we have expected that. We were mentally prepared! 😃
After hard work, a glass of wine fits perfectly to end the day.
I’ll keep you updated on the garden progress in future posts.