Garden Pictures Oct 2008

My fruit trees were a bit of a disappointment this year.

I mentioned in an earlier post when I inherited my garden the previous owner had left a number of fruit trees for me, mostly apples, but they were all planted too close together (about 1m apart) and had not been pruned properly.  The ground most of the trees are growing in is also very wet, and I understand this is not good for most fruit trees.

There were two late frosts in central Europe this spring, that killed almost all the plum tree blossoms everywhere, and my garden was no exception.  There were no local plums to be found anywhere this year.

A few pears formed, but the birds got to them before I could.

Most of my apple trees fruited, but then proceeded to drop the immature apples on the ground.  The picture below shows the only tree that managed to produce ripe apples, and there are still a couple of apples on the tree.

I guess in total I managed to get about 10 apples, which is better than nothing.  They tasted a lot better than store bought, that’s for sure!  While the tree produced a lot more fruits, the rest were eaten by birds, worms or other pests.

This apple tree will live.  The others are scheduled for phased removal over the next couple of years.  Any that show promise after all, before being cut down, may also be given the right to live.  I also have plans to plant some more fruit trees this year, but more on that in a future post.

The Jerusalum Artichokes were one of the big surprises in many ways this year.  For a couple of years now I’ve been growing them in a container on my roof.  Okay, they always completely fill the container with roots and tubers, grow to 2 meters and have small yellow flowers, but in the garden they were different.

I guess because they were root bound in the container, the flowers were always absurdly small.  The flowers were really respectably sized in the garden, and there were really a lot of them!  It made for a nice and colorful corner of the garden.

On my roof the plants were usually able to support themselves, but in the garden the first wind storm that came by blew them all over.  In addition, the stems were very brittle, meaning everytime I tried to prop them up, they usually just broke off.  I’m going to have to give some thought to supporting them better before they come up again next year.

Elsewhere in the garden, blight finally caught up with my tomatoes, and while there are still a few plants left their days are numbered.  The Andean tubers and crosne are still growing (except the Ulluco, which tuned out to be very difficult to grow), and I’m just waiting for the first solid frost to kill the tops before I dig them up and see what I have.

I’ve been busy harvesting bean seeds over the last few weeks, as the plants are all finishing up and the seed pods are drying out.

The celeraic seems like a disappointment so far.  While it did very well in my old garden, the plants have been bolting one at a time over the course of the summer, and of those that remain the roots are very small.

We’ve had a few peppers, but not a lot.  We might still get a few more.  First I had the problem the ground the peppers were in was obviously nitrogen poor, so I planted some beans around them.  Then the beans smothered the pepper plants a bit.  Not very good planning on my part.

We’re still getting chard and nice greens from the perennial onions.

The asparagus has not done great, but we still have about 10 strong plants.  I will dig up the crowns and put them together in one bed for next year.  I’ll also get some more seeds started in order to grow more crowns for next year.

I planted another round of bush (dwarf French) beans mid summer, after harvesting the garlic.  It’s blooming now, but I don’t honestly expect a harvest before the first frost, but we’ll see.  The reason for planting it was to see if a second planting was possible in my climate, but also to replenish the ground after growing the garlic.  Garlic is a heavy feeder.

A really substantial effort went into removing trash left behind by the previous gardener of my plot.  While I certainly applaud his efforts to use recycled materials in his constructions on the plot, this meant a lot of rotting, falling apart and breaking wooden, glass and plastic things to take care of.  He used an incredible amount of plastic in everything from lining the ground under his stone paths, to plant markers and ties. He left lots of just normal trash behind like food packaging and other things.  Much of this trash ended up buried, for me to dig up in the years to come.

He made two composting bins out of used 1000 liter capacity plastic/metal chemical containers.  These were useless as composters, because there wasn’t enough airflow, and not useful for storing water because he had cut holes in them to turn them into composters.  The only thing to do was haul them away which, for each of them, was an exhausting half-day task I did with the help of a fellow gardener a few plots down.

The previous gardener liked paths built from concrete slabs.  Most of the slabs he used ranged from about 50-70 pounds (23-32Kg), and there were more than 100 of them!  They covered more than 10% of the garden and had established weeds growing through all the cracks and corners!  Hauling these all away wasn’t really an option, not just because it would have been wasteful and I would have had to pay for their disposal as construction waste, but it was just too much weight for me to manage by myself — I’m not that strong.

Instead of disposing of all the concrete slabs, I’ve been building raised beds from them.  I’m just finishing the last of 9 raised beds now, about 15m2 of plant bed space and easily 4-5 times that in freed garden space.  It’s the kind of work I could only do a little at a time, so it’s taken all summer.

On top of the trash, the previous gardener left considerable weed problems behind.  Canadian thistles, bindweed (Morning Glories) and nettles are well established in several places, and the seeds of a number of annual weeds are also in the ground (and this years compost) in very large numbers.  Many of these weeds are in the hedge surrounding the garden, and so nearly impossible to remove.

The good news is most of these problems are behind me now, or at least in the process of being dealt with, so I’m looking forward to spending more time actually gardening in the coming years!  It funny how you can look at a garden that’s such a mess, and not really realize it until you actually get started cleaning it up.