Garden Update #1
In my post “The Forgotten Art of Self Sufficiency” I spoke about looking forward to starting my garden farming journey. As a recap, this is something I have been wanting to do for a long time now. I’ve tried before, on a smaller scale, and that taught me a very valuable lesson.
I am amazing at killing plants.
Well, now I’m on the road to farm town once again but this time I have a map, a plan, and most importantly a partner that will (lovingly) hold me accountable.
Here is what we’re working with:
On the left, we have a double sliding door leading out to a cobbled patio area. The top shorter boundary is a wall, the bottom longer boundary is a fence, and the right-hand boundary (aka. The back of the garden) is half wall half fence.
Now, unfortunately, we do not own this house so there are a few things that we cannot change. However, as long as what we do is removable it is allowed. Our landlady is pretty chill, apart from when she had AstroTurf installed improperly and it’s a lumpy weedy mess. Even then, I would rather have shitty grass than a shitty landlord so that is just something we choose to ignore. The grass is queer, just like us. It’s fine.
This plan that we have isn’t completely solidified yet, but we have a basic understanding of what we want to do and it mostly hinges on one of us having a warehouse job.
Guess what that means.
FREE PALLETS.
We’re both pretty crafty, so I’m looking forward to bashing up a couple pallets and transforming them into different things. One of the first things we want to do is make a faux wall using pallet troughs; these are going to sit on the first step up onto the AstroTurf section of the garden to create a nice green boundary that doesn’t close off the back too much. We also want to have some herb walls. This is nothing fancy, just some smaller pallets drilled into the wall and blocked out on each slat so they act as shelves.
Right now we’re trying to work out how to get a few crops going, mainly the bigger things like root vegetables. We’ll need a few deep buckets and troughs for this, we just need to figure out where they’ll be going.
We have a few crops already! I have a trough of strawberry plants that are just over a year old. Last year they yielded a grand total of TWO WHOLE STRAWBERRIES. Amazing. We also had a bulb of garlic bloom in the cupboard, so I decided to incubate it in some moist Tupperware until it rooted. Look at these bad boys!
They’re now out in a tray to grow a bit bigger before we re-pot them into a deeper container. I’ve since learned that, once you harvest garlic, you need to cure it. This means hanging it up somewhere for a month or so to dry. Our little house is going to smell great. Vampires beware…
Other than that, we have a whole heap of flowers, grasses, and shrubs going! Including a second Bleeding Heart because I thought my original one was dead dead. It wasn’t, it just does that. So now we have two. Yay!
So far we have;
- Passionflower
- Honeysuckle
- Jasmine
- Clematis, maybe. The previous tenants left this here and we’re still not exactly sure what type of trailing plant it is.
- Fern
- “Pink Passion” Cordyline palm
- Pink Lily of the Valley!!!
- Lupin
- Gladioli
- 3 whole Hydrangeas that I’ve had to cut back completely and look like spindly freaks right now
- Rhododendron
- A Lemon tree that is… acting very strangely…
- Hyacinths
- Tulips and Daffodils
- Some little blue trailing flower that I forgot the name of
- And others I’ve probably forgotten
Here are a few snaps for you to enjoy~
I'm looking forward to all the blooms we're going to have this Spring & Summer!