When I was teenager me and my brother were helping our grandparents in the garden in the country side in East of Romania. It was to a certain extent nice, but at the same time I did see it as "work" which I would rather not have done. We would plant potatoes, carrots, garlic, onions, beans, tomatoes, corn, pumpkins, etc. for which we had to dig the ground manually. And of course most of work was going into taking care of the grape plants which my grandparents had plenty of (5000 m2).
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| Mashed grapes (mix of red and white) |
That was then. Nowadays since I am a glorified office rat, I miss being outside and doing something useful with my hands and the house project is (nearly) finished. So last year, in early spring, we decided to start our own vegetable and fruit garden. We thought we would like grow the veggies in raised beds of wooden boxes since we have so much wood left from the construction project. But then one day a friendly neighbour asked if we needed some wooden trunks since he had too many. My brilliant other half came up with the idea that we could makes boxes out of the trunks instead of wooden planks.
The soil on our land is quite mixed with clay so no very usable to grow stuff.
We ordered some soil and wooden chips and got to work...
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| we made 7 plots |
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| we planted sugar pea together with leek |
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| plenty of cucumbers, some were bitter |
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| "Tiny Tim" variety had plenty of tomatoes. We have planted between tomatoes also garlic and onions, just to be on the safe side. Tomatoes were free from bugs, maybe garlic helps. |
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| Tiny Tim and spaghetti pumpkin |
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| In early September due to cold weather we had to rescue some tomatoes and ripen them inside the house |
Very tasty green beans
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| 12kg pumpkin which became soups and pies |
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| leek |
I really enjoyed our first year of "farming". I found it therapeutic to come home after work and to look after the plants and of course I appreciated them even more when we eat them :-).
