Hahahahahaaa! Yes! I’m back yet again to confuse you all and lure you into following my projects, get addicted to them, get inspired by them, start thinking “well if she can maybe I…” A thought that, like my projects, slowly, or abruptly, fade away. But who knows, maybe it will be different this time Maybe…I will succeed, at something. Let’s have that as a goal this time, start small, I will succeed at something.
Whats new since a year ago? Well I’m back in Sweden, and I have moved! To the “country”! I live in a house! With a yard! Finally. Now I will have to change the sub-title to a 1000 square meter plot. Yeah you heard me! Although the house occupies a part of it, and the gravel around it which I loath. So maybe more like 700. It’s a garden, it is, but it will still only be a plot. We only rent this place. It has a greenhouse, and the fabulous husband already built a chicken coop (it’s awesome!) like five months ago with used wood that is now slowly rotting waiting for the chickens to come shit in it. We have ordered ten, of a hybrid cheap kind, not the landrace we wanted to preserve and blaha from the beginning, but very productive, easy to manage and organic chickens seems like a good way to start. The Lohmann Brown they’re called.
There’s a plot of land bordering our garden that we can use to further our production. If we have time and enough shovels we want to make a big potato patch, do the holy trinity of corn, pumpkin and beans so that we truly can rely on our own produce this year. Must be much easier now that we only need to step outside the door to get to the garden as opposed to bike 6 kilometers. We moved here end of last june, and had some time to garden. Well I didn’t do anything of course, I was in complete writing/reading mode plus mothering the hell out of my now two-year old ray of sunshine. We had tomatoes for a long time, from the greenhouse of course, lots of small cucumbers that Rachid fermented, a greenhouse cucumber that was the most delicious I’ve ever eaten, Suyo Long. Highly recommend that one! Really crisp and delicious. Mmmm! We also had a good harvest of purple string beans, lots of zucchini of course, lettuce, parsley, thai basil, celery. A ton of grapes from the old grape-vine in the greenhouse! I made juice of that, aha, I did something!
Other things didn’t succeed, the potatoes got blight, the transplanted parsnip didn’t grow, the beets fooled us, the cabbage was stubborn as always. The corn really grew but only gave us a couple of cobs to eat. Soleiman ate them raw. The chard didn’t evolve at all, only the sorrel that no one wanted to eat grew with great ease. Later we found it was delicious to fry, tasted like spinach with tangy lemon. I’m sorry sorrel, for judging you by your pre-cooked state. I made a delicious omelette with the sorrel, chard and some early kale.
Some pictures from early autumn, late autumn with chicken coop almost finished, and winter with finished chicken coop. I’ll get back to you with more on the chicken situation soon. As you might suspect the garden was all lawn before we came and started digging it up and replacing it with edible beauty. We will do some more of that this season rest assured.
So there is lots to write about! And do. Tomorrow I will split up and move the autumn raspberry plants so that they block our neighbours SUV (I did say “country”) and give us a huge harvest. Seriously, this blog really motivates me to get my act together and really invest myself in this plot for independence and the work of art gardening means to me. I hope it has the same effect on you!
To be continued….(well, at some point anyway.)
Plot for Independence 