Hello! Hello!
Spring has sprung:
It lets you know
with noses bunged,
and snot that flows!
Indeed it is spring/summer here, and as implied in the poem above my sinuses suffer greatly from it! But despite that fact my snot flows, my eyes itch, throat feels raw and I sneeze endlessly like someone with the 'flu, the garden monkey is swinging around in the garden.
I did cheat and planted a bunch of sunflower seeds indoors in end of April, and indeed they bloomed nicely last month:
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| The Anne Marie (named so after a friend who looked after it while we were away 2 weeks in May) |
A friend fostered her seedlings at our flat as we have a south facing window, and the plants simply mutated and grew all Triffiddy in the light, despite the fact the temperature was below zero (at night) until 2 weeks ago.
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| Peppers and Tomatoes galore, ready to take over the world! |
This year we managed to get a garden plot in the communal growing area. A decent sized 6.9 by 2.1 m (odd size, I know). Would have preferred it to be a bit narrower so we can water the middle easier, but it'll have to do.
The soil was very poor, sandy and depleted of organic material, so into it went 40 x 20kg bags of well composted Sheep Manure, 5 x 20 litres equivalent bags of sphagnum moss, and additional 50kg of Steer Manure (supplied by the communal garden organiser). A lot of turning of soil ensued. It was hard work, partly because the provided (depleted) soil was frozen at the core still when we got the Shit (haha!) together.
Several days of foeces flinging and jokes about how much Bullshit goes on in the garden .... and waiting for the frozen core to thaw...
The first things to go in was Potatoes! A whole bunch of Yukon Gold potatoes buried in the middle trench (where it's awkward to water properly), surrounded by a couple bulb thickness of red onions.
In the meantime, a whole bunch of seeds were sown in toilet rolls and egg cartons. Admittedly I had to buy the black seedling trays just so water don't seep everywhere inside. Seedwise, it's all seeds that I had from 2 years ago. Didn't get a chance to do any gardening last year due to the C. Difficile problem. Still recovering from that, even after technically being "eradicated" of the colonies in the colon (ha! I joke!).
If you ever get C Difficile superbug, get treatment, pronto. That nasty stuff can kill you in
days if you are immunologically impaired. Even post-infection, it still takes a big chunk of your energy away, not to mention being completely dependent of having a toilet nearby (within 2 minutes, I'd say), 24 hours a day.
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| Toilet Rolls, egg cartons, fruit cups, yogurt containers, not to mention an instant noodle box, all are suitable seedling containers |
Enough shitty stories, so after a couple of weeks, they looked like this. With exception of the Fluffy Black and White Thing on the Fluffy Cream Thing. That was not grown from seed.
That is the Grumpy Cat of our Apartment. He hates having to share sun space with plants. He ate a few seedlings, too.
Transplanted the egg carton seedlings into the yogurt pots after they grew true leaves. There's something oddly calming about obsessing with leetle teeny seedlings...
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| Getting a bit crowded in here... |
A lot more photographs of the garden plot to come, I'm still figuring out how to transfer the photos in my phone to here.... but as of Thursday 12th June, the peas sown into the garden on Monday (9th June) have hatched. The Plot gets plenty of sunlight, now that it's close to summer solstice, and this far North, it's roughly 21.5 hours of light a day! And a lot of watering. Lots of it! Otherwise things start to dry out and die ....
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| Promising a better tomorrow! :) |
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