Garden and flowers

On Sunday I finally got around to doing some bigger pot planting. The summer having been so poor, the motivation for gardening is real low. On Sunday, anyway, I planted some basil, parsley cucumber, pepper, aubergine and courgettes into slightly bigger pots. The size of pots that can be taken inside, come autumn. None of those will be producing anything during this summer. 

The potatoes and onions are doing quite ok, radishes not so much even though they have grown huge leaves; the ground is too tough for them to grow properly with all the clay. We'll get a lot of apples, despite the locusts in the trees, I'm sure, and wild strawberries are growing wildly.

Despite the weather, flowers in our yard seem to be doing quite well.

Yesterday I visited my grandma at our summerplace. It was a rainy day, but I enjoyed being there. The huge rhododendron there is at the end of its blooming, most flowers have wilted already, some are still looking nice.

Doing some planting

Inspired and encouraged by the early spring, we started planting our herb garden last week. We planted som dill, basil, courgette and cucumber seeds. Also, we got some thyme, mint, rosemary and chives in pots and transferred them into bigger pots and placed them all in out mud room, our cold foyer.

Then we got hit by winter again. The pots with seeds are still in the mud room, but the potted plants we needed to take inside. So now our shower room is hosting our herbs until spring comes back. I guess this is just how it always goes in Finland. The dance of prince winter and the spring fairies. We've even got songs about it.

Zucchini flowers

Koriander, spinach, dill etc. have leaves turning red, like autumn foliage. Even zucchinis, that usually are rather good growers even in our colder climate, have really not been growing their leaves. A couple of them have started pushing out flowers, though. Salad is doing good, even now.

 

Summer at last

It's finally summer, with the night temperatures staying above +10C too. Things in our garden grow nicely: beans, both planted and wild flowers, strawberries and the midsummer night's rose bloom and we already made our first rocket salad out of our own rucola. 

Today we put our zucchinis, cucumbers and tomatoes to the ground (not pots this time), and basil into big garden boxes. We also planted some thyme and oregano and some more salad too.

Besides the rucola and onions growing for the second year unexpectedly, we also have found a couple real surprises in our garden. A little maple is growing in one of last year's pots, and I found a little yellow violet growing in last year's onion bed. I salvaged it to a pot before turning and cleaning the dirt for the zucchinis and cucumbers.

Garden coming along

Despite the colder weathers, chives and spring onions are growing nicely outside, and even the salads and beans are to be sprouting. Inside, the zucchinis are growing, as is basil, but the aubergines are taking their time. Also, on the yard, the hosta undulatas are poking through the ground.

 

Sprouts

One of our zucchinis has a nice sprout already, a couple others are showing a small corner of green. Also, one pot of basils has one proper sprout, some others are showing signs. It's still so cold that we can't even take the pots outside in the day time.

 

 

Garden work

Finally we got around to do some garden work. We planted basil, zucchini, aubergines, dill, parsley, beans, rucola, salad and spinach seeds in boxes. A whole lot of herbs, tomato and chili plants etc. are on the shopping list, probably getting some plants instead of seeds again later on. And we were thinking of getting some flower seeds this year too.

 

 

Chives are already growing nicely by the sunny wall, but I cleaned the pot and added some new seeds there today. I also cleaned and turned the dirt in the bean pots, and planted those beans where they were growing last summer too. Otherwise the sunny wall is still all old pots waiting to be cleaned out and re-planted. And the bunnies are waiting for some of those flower seeds ;)

 

Spring onions will be ready for harvest here soon!

 

Garden in late August

Even though most days still are quite warm - after that autumn spell a week ago - the nights have turned quite cold. Cold enought to put the tomatoes into a non-productive safe-mode and most of the other plants into slower motion as well. There were still three cucumbers, fully grown, that I picked today, as well as a zucchini in the zucchini plant, which actually has still put out a couple new flowers!

But the tomatoes are not growing anymore, and not ripening anymore. So I picked the rest of the tomatoes to ripen in our house. Hopefully they do!

 

The bhut jolokia seems unweilding to the cool nights, is making new flowers and growing its purple chilis rapidly! Soon we can make some fiercely hot purple jolokia chili ;)

 

We pulled the rest of our red onions out of the ground; they didn't do quite as well as we had hoped, but definately we can use at least some of them, too.

 

We also trimmed the basil again, making another 1 liter batch of pesto out of it. There's still plenty left to grow, we'll see how well it does with the autumn coming on here. Oregano still awaits picking and drying.

 

Garden in late July

I was away for a mere week. Yet, so much had happened in our garden in that short time! The medina chilis had started to turn red, as had the first cherry tomatoes. The green pepper and naga jolokia had started to grow their first fruits. Cucumber, aubergine and zucchini were hanging heavy with ripe fruits. Beans and sugar peas were ready to be harvested.

 

We harvested quite a lot of the stuff yesterday evening.

 

Beans we made into a side dish by boiling them and then adding oil and crushed garlic. Zucchinis we grilled, and the aubergine I peeled, sliced and deepfried. We also have more rucola than we can possibly eat, so we had some if that at the dinner table too. At least a small effort ;)

 

The sunny wall got hit by some hard winds, knocking the tomatoes and some other pots over. The plants are a bit leaning on each other now, but still they seem to be happy enough!

 

First cucumbers

The first cucumbers were ready to be picked yesterday. Every other day there's a new ripe tomato. Sugar peas are ready to be harvested.

 

Zucchini keeps making flowers, and fruits too.

 

Salads and rocket are pretty perfect.

 

Oh, and there a tiny 1-2cm long baby beans on the bean bushes!

 

Harvesting

We went to visit my sister for some grilling and such and took with us some zucchinis, eggplants, zucchini flowers (stuffed with feta cheese), the first ripe tomato, basil and and salads - a little bit of harvesting of our garden :)

 

The sugar peas are full of ripe peas, while the beans have just started to produce flowers. Strawberries, every day there's a few new ripe delicious ones!

 

Garden update

Both green pepper and the bhut jolokia have been growing a lot lately. Jolokia has a whole lot of flowers, green pepper is getting ready to bloom too. Cucumber plants have grown very tall, our bamboo poles aren't even tall enough for them anymore! And little cucumbers are growing on both plants.

Salad, rucola and spring onions continue to prosper on the hilltop, despite the continuous invasion of red clover (which I weeded out again today, after taking the picture). Rucola in the pot has gone wild, and parsley is growing nicely.

Only sad ones on our sunny wall are those chives, for some reason or other.

 

Zucchinis are growing by the day, soon we'll be having our first grilled ones! And the first tomato is starting to turn red.

It also seems that our funny scarecrow is actully keeping the birds away, for now for the first time I have seen the strawberries stay intact while ripening.

 

 

More blooming in the garden

Yesterday we noticed the bhut (naga) jolokia had finally opened its first flowers! Maybe we'll get some real hot chili, too, after all! Sugar peas are blooming too, as are the cucumbers. The zucchinis have a couple peculiar siamese twin fruits.

 

 

Courgettes

I believe that the flowers, filled with feta or mozzarella and (deep)fried are almost the best part of the zucchinis. Thursday evening when we had the first four zucchini flowers - courgettes - big enought to eat, we filled them with feta cheese and fried them. So good!

But mind you, only take the male flowers and/or flowers from ripe zucchinis.

 

 

Zucchini flower opened overnight

Yesterday morning it was 5cm. In the evening it was still a bud, but 9cm.

In the morning, ta-daa:

I suppose those petals will uncurl even further in the course of the day.

Going on in the garden

A lot of stuff going on. We hung the sugar peas on the wooden fence - hope their feelers find their way to the fence and grab on!

I hung a red christmas ball both on the big tomato and chili plants to keep the birda away, for they had been messing around in the plant boxes.

Oregano was transplanted in a bigger box and found its place between the basil boxes.

We got some bamboo poles and wire and built some supports for the beans that had started to fall over.

The eggplant and cherry tomatoes and other tomatoes are growing by the day. Cucumber plant has the first little starts of cucumbers now too!

That first zucchini flower is really big and growing right before our eyes. It more or less doubled its size only today! There's a whole lot of those zucchini flowers already, but that first one out is really showing the way for the others.

We also started today to build a drip irrigation system for our garden. Its somewhat complicated...

Things growing

Zucchini plants are getting bigger and bigger and have started yo grow zucchinis.

Spinach in the box is doing much better than that on the hill ever did (it started to groq flowers before there were reallyany usable leaves) and yesterday we made our first spinach salad out of our own box.

Beans and sugar peas are seemingly happy.

Basil is soon big enough to contribute to our meals.

Fruits of our Garden

Tomatoes are growing bigger, as is the first aubergine. Strawberries are producing a lot of fruit, though none of them are ripe yet. The zucchinis are preparing to put out flowers, the plants already being quite big.

Our garden in early June

A heatwave has been caressing our garden these past days. Eggplant has its first flower, several tomatoes are growing, there's 14 chilis on the medina, and everything is growing right before our eyes.

Eggplant, tomatoes and the medina

Basil, oregano, spinach and dill

Zucchini, cucumber, peas and beans

Our bhut jolokia seems to be a bit tiny and is not growing taller all that fast, but it does have some flower buds already too!

Doin' some gardening

It was raining in the morning and it started raining again some time in the afternoon, but we got a good couple huors of garden work in in between. We transplanted our basils and zucchinis and green pepper, and planted some more dill and spinach - my husband finally revealed that the mystery crop there was spinach - and some beans and sweet peas.

Zucchinis with our onion bed in the background

Basil

The "mystery crop", turned out to be spinach