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This is the first year when I succeeded keeping flowers alive for long enough to bloom. I do not have as much time as last year to be in the garden, so I decided to cut some flowers and enjoy them at home in a vase.

So far, I got a bouquet of Pfingstrosen. I planted it last spring, but it remained without bloom, but this year it did not disappoint. It was a joy to look at them.

My husband also brought some of the roses. The small, red ones are particularly sturdy. The rose bush is largely unaffected by parasites and the roses in the vase are almost two weeks old and look still fresh. The yellow roses look a bit like English roses, which I only saw in pictures until now.

I planted the ranunculus seeds very late this year (March instead of December) and I was not very hopeful about them. Yet here they are, looking great. As soon as the seedling got some energy, they were very low maintenance. I used some blue beans to protect them from slugs.

I still have some lavandel and summer flowers that did not bloom yet.

I was busy with a lot of admin stuff in the last weeks and working on this website had to take a step back. So it is only now that I can post the second part about what we harvested in our garden last year.

Produce from below the ground

We planted onions and garlic both last year and the year before that. To my shame, I only just learned that if you want to harvest the big garlic cloves, you need to leave the garlic over the winter and harvest the next year. It is also possible to plan onions in the autumn and leave them over the winter to harvest big onions in the spring.

Potatoes were just a fun, on the whim project. They are cheap enough in the supermarket, but on the other hand they are low maintenance and very fun to get out of the dirt with your kid. We also got some unusual sort of potatoes with red peel and yelowish inside, which we never found in the supermarket. The potatoes we harvested were delicious, probably also due to the satisfaction of having produced them ourselves.

Produce from above the ground

Zucchini are also a low maintenance plant. Once they get going, you just need to water them. They also yield a lot of fruits. We had four zucchini plants and we got more then we can eat. This year I would probably harvest the flowers too and try some recipies.

Our kid loves cucumbers and he ate almost all the cucumbers we got last year.

We planted a lot of chard. This salad goes nicely with spaghetti and it’s very expensive in the supermarket. So we are definetly having it in the garden this year, but maybe only half of the plants.

We also had a bed with just herbs. Parsley dominated it in the end. We also have a lovage plant, which just grows back every year. This one is very prone to plant lice and I will try to find out what to do about it this year. The rosemary plant turned into an uncontrolled bush. We do not like rosemary very much so this year I am not having it again in the garden and I hope I removed all roots properly.

The beans were also a nice surprinse for us given how easy they grow and how much you get from just one plant. They also kept producing until late October. Green beans are not very cheap in the supermarket and sometimes they are just not good (too old, to stringy), so it is worth having them in the garden.

So this concludes the garden reports. I hope this year brings at least half of what we got last year. As we now have a baby in the family, I cannot be as productive as last year. I am thinking to write another post about my goals in the garden for this year, but this is not really my style. But who knows?

Our small garden kept on giving until late in October. This is not a botanical classification of the things we harvested, just a way to make the story more organized. Here is the first part about the harvest. Read about the planting in my previous post.

Fruits

With about two square meters of strawberry plants, we were surprised how much such a small surface can yield. Strawberries are a low maintenance plant. We just put mulch around them and checked for slugs often. Our son ate most of the harvest, so not jam resulted from these.

We planted the red currant bushes last autumn, so there was not a lot to harvest this year. The red currants had the same fate as the strawberries – our son loves these too. Funnily enough, he doesn’t like the store bough currants nearly as much, although they taste the same. I suspect is the eating directly from the bush that he is missing.

We inherited a black currant bush from the previous tenant. None of us like them very much fresh, but it seemed such a waste to not harvest them. From the 4-5 kilograms I plucked, I made several jars of jam. I used a strainer to remove the skin and the seeds from the currants and the results was delicious.

The grape vine was also in the garten when we took over it. I have no clue what kind of grapes it produces, but these species of grape vine is used a lot around Europe for providing shade. The fruits are sweet on the inside, their skin is sour and they have a lot of seeds. Compared to the sweet, seedles, thin skin version from the supermarket, with these grapes you are never bored when you eat them.

We planted one melon seedling just for fun, without much hope for the outcome, considering the rainy, clowdy weather I enjoy around my area. The seedlig grew a lot and made plenty of flowers and tiny melons. Soon I understood that I need to keep this plan short and force it to store its energy in 2-3 melons if we want to get something edible out of it. In the end we got 3 melons, which were fairly tasty.

Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? I leave this discussion to biologists and culinary experts. I made it my personal project to grow tomatoes this year after the complete failure from last year. Tomatoes are high maintenance. They love light, but no direct sunlight. They need water, but not on their leaves. They have no control over how much and in what direction they grow. Their fruits are disproportionally big compared to their fragile stems. They are also very sensitive to parasites.

My husband built a small covered enclosure to protect the tomato plants from direct sunlight. A friendly neighbour sprayed the plants with a Bordeaux mixture. I pruned them almost weekly and supported the stems with sticks. The hard work paid off and we got a lot of tomatoes during the summer. At the end of September, my mother-in-law even had enough to prepare two huge 8 liter jars of pickled green tomatoes, a popular preserve in Romania.

I will continue this post soon.