South hall painted Sunday, 21-May-23 21:20:39 CEST

Finished painting the north hall Sunday, 04-Jun-23 22:00:48 CEST

Sunday, 28-May-23 21:05:35 CEST

Watering system for the garden

This week we planted and sowed. We also got a watering system for our gardens.

Monday 22 May

Today, we both worked from the office. We arrived well on time and left the office well on time as well. When I came home, I continued working from home for a while until my employee hours for the day were adequately locked in.

Then we both went outside to do some work in the garden! I took out the tiller machine and reworked the flower garden. Then I returned to the driveway's vegetable garden and ran that again. The soil had a chance to dry for a few days; this time, it had to be the final tilling. I should have added more sand, but I hope this works well.

At the flower garden, I got a stack of concrete chunks. They are remnants of our neighbor's floor. When the floor was made, they cleared the concrete truck in our garden. I have been recovering these gradually while working in the garden. I am thinking I can turn this pile into a miniature stone garden. It gives me a bittersweet feeling that the junk someone dumped can become a feature of the garden. The pile is at the edge; I think it needs to move inside the garden a little.

Next up, I started sowing and planting the vegetable garden. I planted French beans, cucumber, squash, and amaranth (Amaranthus hypochondriacus).

I sowed red onions, carrots, and beetroot.

Tuesday 23 May

Today after work, I sowed "Lokförare Bergfält" (Pisum sativum), a colossal pea. I got these from DM. The article about this pea is written in Swedish. The pea will be 3 meters tall and will get violet flowers. I am curious how this goes. The peas are enormous and very sweet. They originate from Sweden, from a man that was a train machinist, so the full name is "Train machinist Bergfälts giant pea." The peas are about 2 euros per pea (right now) because making good seeds from them is complex, and the peas are desirable in Sweden.

Wednesday 24 May

Today I worked half day from home. I cleaned the tiller machine in the afternoon and returned it to the rental shop. DW primed the bedroom hall on the first floor. I made a port for the vegetable garden.

Soon we will move the sheep here, so we will need a proper port.

I also sowed runner beans in the garden at the driveway.

Thursday 25 May

Last week on Saturday, 20 May, I prepared a tray of Corn, Squash, and Pumpkin. This morning you could already see the tips of the plants coming up out of the soil!

We worked from the office. DW had a gathering for a colleague that should leave. We came home somewhat late. Over the day, the plants made enormous progress!

In the garden, I decided to sow Sevilla potatoes (slightly mealy) I bought at the grocery store last Saturday. I also had three potatoes that I got from DM. I am unsure where she got them from or what their name is.

I am documenting what I am sowing and where because you never know what you want to know and when. There can be a day later in the season when I wonder when that sowed and how did that look? I recall I found a book at a second-hand shop on 22 February 2020 discussing the benefits of making a garden diary. I started on the weekly blog format I have used since early April 2020. If I should criticize myself, I would say I am not good at making categories. Had it not been nice to have more categories about the garden and the cottage in Sweden? I have to think about that.

The cucumber has been battered by the wind. I had two cucumber plants, and one is broken. The Squash and French beans are also severely battered by the wind, some leaves are hanging, but I think they will survive.

This evening I also sowed in the first salad bed: Koriander, Carrot Jeanette, Chervil, Arugola, and Basilicum.

This year I don't think I will do any bell pepper. I decided that that is a project for a glass house.

Friday 26 May

Today I worked from the office. After work, I decided to make homemade pizza. I understood that it is essential baking the pizza really hot. Unfortunately, I don't have a large spade, so I had to move the pizza with the help of baking paper, and that is not ideal. The dough should ideally be shocked by the pan, which is the idea, and it is less ideal when using insulating paper. Here is room for improvement! For the rest, the pizza was delicious.

I also went out in the garden at night and watered the plants. It is so dry right now that they must have some water every night. When I was standing there in the dark, it occurred to me that we would spend much time watering the garden. Perhaps we should look into a better watering solution?

Saturday 27 May

This morning the tray of plants greeted me with great happiness! There are a couple of buckets that did not give anything yet. That is also fine; the buckets that do work can perhaps be planted already tomorrow.

The first proper task of today was to move the sheep to the area in front of the house. Next week they will get their hair cut, and for that event, we need a smaller enclosure so that we don't need to run around to catch them. We took the scaffold and built a square from that. On that, we attached four building fence sections. They are sturdy, so the sheep will not get entangled in that fence.

We could also build a roof on the construction, giving the sheep the necessary shadow. Around midday, the new area was ready, and the girls were happily eating off the tall grass. We had lunch, and after lunch, we started discussing different ways to solve the watering challenges. We concluded that we should acquire a droplet pipe system for watering our vegetable garden.

It was late in the afternoon when we got to the shop, luckily they had all the things we needed. I was eager to install the system in the garden beside the driveway.

I unrolled the pipe in a way that made it difficult to lay it straight out. It took me a considerable amount of attempts to get it slightly straighter. I even tried to fill it with water to see if that would help, but indeed that was not good because then I had to handle a wet pipe.

I used scraps of electric cable for fastening the pipe to the ground. That helped to hold it down. That way, I could concentrate on arranging shorter stretches, and in that way, I had laid out the whole pipe before the sun went down.

After dinner, I went into the garden and planted most of the pumpkin, squash, and corn tray. Now I placed the plants near the watering pipe. I placed the corn near each other. That is to support pollination.

The pumpkin and squash are planted at a slightly greater distance but not so far away from each other that they deserve. Last year I lost a lot of the pumpkin plants to slugs. Had I planted them at a proper distance, there would have been no room for all the plants, and the plants that did survive in the end had plenty of room around them. I am unsure about the slug situation this year, but it looks slightly better right now.

I also sowed more rows in the salad beds. The first bed is now wholly sowed.

Row	Sort
1 – 5	Loose leaf lettuce. This is from last year.
5	Flat parsley
7 – 8	Curly parsley
9 – 10	Radish
11	Basilicum
14 – 15	Arugula
16	Chervil
17	Carrot Jeanette
18	Coriander

 

The second bed still has some room left.

Sunday 28 May

Today I was keen on installing the complete watering system. DW was eager to paint halls.

I started by rolling out the 25-meter soaker hose for the berry bushes along the edge of the vegetable garden. I made the tube go around each bush, alternating on each side of the bush. The strawberries also got rounded by the pipe. This part of the project was not difficult at all. At the Mirabell tree (Prunus domestica subspecies Syriaca), I cut the hose, let an ordinary pipe cross the path, and let the soaker hose continue after the tree to the end of the shrubs.

The inner part of the garden is divided into four rows of beds. I let the hose go to the end of each row, back again, and cross over to the next row, repeating this four times. Ideally, I would like the path not to be watered, but I understand that the path also holds essential life. To avoid that, I would need 26 connection pieces, and it would not make sense to buy those right now.

After this achievement, I installed the watering computer. I programmed it to water the gardens in the evening. DW thought it was a prominent piece hanging on the front of our house. She regrets that it is placed in such a visible place. I don't mind. Yes, it is visible, but that means we can keep an eye on it.

With this done, I wanted to have my garden wholly sowed in. Anything I wanted to have to grow, I wanted to get into the ground today. I sowed the remaining part of the driveway garden, and I sowed the second salad bed as well.

In the process, I also got a considerable amount of sun exposure. There was a cold wind combined with the sun, so I did not feel the heat from the sun that much. In the evening I realized that I had got sunburn on my arms and on my head. That was not good. I will need to be more careful.

DW painted the two halls. It is not entirely finished, but she has come a long way!

I got delayed in publishing this blog. That is because the next week became a really busy week.