Snazzie's vegetable garden, an update
The elderberries (on the left), we leave the on the bush for the birds. Just like the red currants, we pick just a few. The birds love elderberries and red currants, we love to have birds in the garden.
The blueberries also failed this year. Last year we harvested all told 6 berries, when the bush was small. Now it's grown a lot but not a berry in sight.
It all started very well with the vegetable garden in April. The vegetables shots from the nursery so in May could all go outside. Radish, beetroot, fennel bulbs and lettuce. The lettuce did well and we thought the other vegetables did as well, you could watch them grow. In May, we planted three pumpkin seeds, fun for October and to make pumpkin soup.
Unfortunately in September no tubers showed on the beetroot and fennel. The Pumpkins did not come up at all, very unfortunate. The lettuce and the radish we ate, they were very tasty though!
The raspberries started out very good, sturdy shoots shot from the soil and got little flowers. Unfortunately, after a short period in time the leaves changed into lace. A regiment caterpillars crawled against the underside of the leaves and they ate their way upwards.
After a few weeks the caterpillars disappeared completely unexpected by themselves. We took a gloomy view to the problem because we do not want to fight insects in the garden with insecticides but the eco-friendly way to get rid of them is to manually remove them :(
We do not know why the caterpillars left but we were very happy about it. The are really harmful to the palnt but fortunately it recovered very quickly. Now we harvest every 2-3 days a little bowl full of raspberries and they taste delicious!
Our strawberry plant (only one for the garden is postage stamp size) did it excellent indoors but outside he gets a second wind after the first harvest and starts over again. We also harvest a small bowl at a time but only once a week.
The radishes always do well, there are about six at once ready for harvest so that's fine! We've planted them especially at intervals of one week. The radishes we enjoyed very much. They are best eaten fresh and crunchy, just out of the ground!
Lettuce from your own garden, nothing can beat it, Freshly picked it tastes so soft and crunchy. The more salad you pick the harder it grows, super fun! This year, the snails have not joined in. We have sown the salad mix seeds into a large pot and not replanted it directly in the garden like we did last year. This year we ate it all ourselves!
The fennel, sown on April 27, needs 80-100 days to grow before it's ready to harvest. After two weeks germination worked fine, late May replanting outside as well. But in mid-September (after 130 days) no nice fennel bulb but a pathetic root.
We have to try again!