Etikett: planting

The garden pt. 2

Good things come to those who wait…and remember to water their plants. We had a successful first harvest and we definitely accomplished something with this gardening project. The flower and herb garden attracted a whole lot of insects which was very exciting to watch even though some of the plants suffered a bit – the salvia bush seems to have been pretty tasty for someone as several leaves had holes in them.

The gardening project has also been beneficial to the environment. First we have noticed an increase in insect activity. Pollinators have been busy with the flowers and spiders have enjoyed spinning their webs amongst the plants. It even attracted hares and deer who ate up all the parsley in the fall, they must have been pretty hungry.

Other than that, we did not encounter any major challenges with the growing. Actually, thats not true. We had tomatoes and zucchini growing in individual pots and despite our best efforts, the zucchini ended up not doing so great.

Maybe we didn’t fertilise it enough, maybe the stalks ended up ‘strangling’ the zucchini. Either way, we did not manage to grow many zucchini and the ones that did grow were small and hard. Maybe next year? I doubt it. The tomatoes on the other hand came out really well!

The highlight though (at least for me) were the herbs. They thrived in our garden and as a result, we were able to cook meals with fresh homegrown herbs. We had thyme, lemon thyme, salvia, parsley, rosemary and mint. A lot of mint. The parsley bush was huge but almost disappeared overnight in the fall when a desperately hungry creature came and ate most of it. We had thought the taste would be too powerful but apparently not!

For the next grow, we are discussing a larger garden for more herbs and less vegetables. Jenny wants to try growing potatoes and carrots and I would like to try growing spinach, oregano and garlic. The tomatoes and zucchini were fun to try but in my opinion were not worth the amount of time and effort. Either way, we will be more prepared and better with the next gardening project after having learnt a whole lot from this one.

The garden pt. 1

The garden was one of our most talked about ideas when we were planning for cabin life. The idea was to grow a 50/50 mix of herbs and vegetables to get a feel for gardening. It would be our first real project together! We agreed on the following criteria – we would grow vegetables, herbs and flowers that would last one year. We obviously had a tonne of questions but the main ones were:

  • How do we keep away hungry creatures from eating everything?
  • How often do we need to water the garden?
  • What about fertilising?
  • What do we need to get started?

Supplies were relatively easy to procure. Planks used for the herb garden were leftovers from a build project, rocks were collected from the beach and plastic pots were found at a nearby trash station. We had to find soil and plants. Soil was 99% horse poop from Jenny’s grandmother (tack Kickan!) who has a fantastic garden herself and we added some kelp fertiliser from our beach to the mix. We also ended up purchasing a few sacks of garden soil and mixed that in with the horse manure and kelp. As for water, we reserved a barrel of rainwater for the garden which was perfect.

The build was relatively straightforward and hastily done. The important thing was that it would hold its contents! We had thought about covering the box with netting to deter the animals from eating the plants but ultimately decided to leave it as is.

Alot of research was done on what plants we wanted to try growing and we decided to focus on a deer and rabbit resistant selection of herbs as well as flowers. One of the gardeners at the greenhouse gave us a bag of untreated sheep’s wool to try out as a deer deterrent and funnily enough, it worked…until late autumn when the parsley bush mysteriously dwindled in size overnight! We presume the wool has a very powerful smell that deters other animals. Whatever it does, it works and we will be using it next year again for sure.

The final selection of herbs included thyme, lemon thyme, rosemary, parsley and mint. The flowers were a mix of colours and shapes and we even managed to transplant some wild strawberry plants and orpines.

Close ups of the flowers that we bought. They grew in bushes so we thought they’d look nice once they ‘fluffed’ up a bit.

Funnily enough, the day we built the garden was the same day that we had our first proper encounter with our garden’s biggest threat: the deer! Perhaps it was curious about the garden (and future food possibilities) or perhaps it was passing through the neighbourhood…either way, we had never seen it this close before and it didn’t appear to be very nervous with our presence. Lets see how it goes…