I stumbled upon some pop psychology information in a newspaper or on YouTube, cannot recall which: don’t ask yourself what you find relaxing, but rather what soothes you. It’s a good question and I do not have a full answer for it yet.
Looking at planes is certainly one of those things. Fortunately we leave quite close to the airport and before we move away from the Zurich area, I want to go more often and just look at airplanes land, eat an ice-cream and feel the wanderlust.
These are some shots from the last time we went to the Pistenende.
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
OnionsGarlicPotatoes
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 starting to growReady for harvestCucumbersChardHerbs – parsley, lovage and taragonYellow beans
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.
StrawberriesBlack currantsHome made black currant jamGrapesMelonTomatoes
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.
Last year was the first one when we had our own garden patch from the gardening association in our town. This garden was our go-to during all the weekends when we did not have another outdoor activity planned. We tried our hand at growing vegetables or relaxed by the fire grilling. But mainly we used it as a safe place for our kid to consume energy and do what kids do.
At the end of February, we started with some cleaning and preparing planting beds.
Gardening tools – many left from the previous tenant. The kid helping with the planting beds.
At the beginning of March, we prepared seedlings of vegetables that we buy a lot. We used plastic containers from take away or the supermarket vegetables. After filling them up with soil and planting the seeds, we watered them and left them on the balcony. In the end it took almost two months to see seedlings coming out of the soil. So our assumption that the balcony is a bit warmer then the garden was wrong and this year we are keeping the seedlings inside the apartment, hoping they will grow faster.
Zucchini seedling.Very late strawberry seedlings on the balcony.
In the garden, things started to come back to life by the end of March to middle of April. We kept the flowers to a minimum, just along the front fence because we are practical people who are motivated to tend to things that actually produce something. We planted a few red currant bushed the previous year because the kid loves them, but only if he can pluck them himself. My mother-in-law helped with with the onion bed. We also had onions and garlic from last year, which we learned one should leave in the ground over the winter to get to the big size. Not pictured here is the potatoes bed, which we decided to have just for fun and because we had some potatoes that are not normally in the standard supermarket supply.
Daffodils – planted in December 2021.Rose bushes along the garden fence.Also planted the previous year during autumn.The fence was build by my husband in 2021.Salad planted directly in the bed.Some winter onions from last year.Garlic from last year.New onion showing up.The red currant bush coming back from the winter sleep.
By mid-May, things were starting to shape-up nicely. The weather was now warm enough, so we planted the few seedling we got. We also got lucky with a neighbour, who had too many tomato seedlings, so we got about 20 of those and were able to try our hand with tomatos too. Not pictured here are the seedlings from cucumbers and melons, which we bought from a local farmer.
Potatoes in the front, onion in the middle and salad in the back.Zucchini seedlings transfered in the garden.Chard seedlings looking tired.Lavender, a low maintenance flower.Strawberry plants starting to bloom.Our unexpected tomato patch with an improvised cover made of leftover materials.
We added a pergola in the back of the garden to create a sitting space. The frame and the concrete tiles were placed there in 2021. Last year we added the finishing touches – fabric to provide shade and light bulbs for decoration.
View from below the pergola, with a piece of the table just visible below. We though this was an outdoor table. We found out it is not after the first rain.
By mid-May, we were practically finished with the planting phase. In the first months of spring, the garden generally looks very neat and weeds are easy to keep at bay. While this part was mostly work and no produce, it was still satisfying to see how investing just a few hours every week pays off.
