Food & baking, Hobbies, lifestyle

Hello reader!

This year has been a great one in many ways. One big reason why is that we finally started growing some of our own food; a dream of mine for several years. It’s an incredible feeling to harvest crops and cook them for dinner an hour later.
Our goal is to increase the amount of things we grow, and to spread it out more throughout the year. It would be fantastic to be somewhat self-sustainable regarding veggies and berries in the future.

But first things first! This was our first year, which meant a chance to test things out and learn from it. We’re still trying things as I type this, but in this post I thought I’d share some things that we have learned so far, and will do differently next year. We are in no way, shape or form experts in this subject, so please consider this a very personal experience that might differ from yours.

Our first year we have been growing onions, carrots, potatoes (four different kinds), Swiss chard, strawberries, and two different kinds of tomatoes. The tomatoes were a gift from my mother though, so we haven’t actually planted those ourselves.
The carrots, onions, and Swiss chard were planted from seeds. The potatoes were so called “seed potatoes” with sprouts. We started with “Dior” and “Cherie”, and later also planted “Empress” and “Amandine”. The strawberries were small plants that we ordered from an online gardening store.

OUR SETUP, AND WHAT I’VE LEARNED

Our current setup is three EU-pallets with pallet collars that I engrained with food-safe linseed oil, to protect the wood from moisture. We also have some pots as well.
In the pallet collars we put a sheet of plastic on the bottom (we don’t have a garden, so they are placed on our patio. We used the plastic to prevent dirty water from discolouring the decking.) We then added a bunch of sticks and twigs, followed by the soil and some manure. This has helped with the drainage on rainy days. Even if we have plastic in the bottom, the sticks and twigs are an excellent layer to keep the crops out of standing water.

We have one pallet collar with only strawberries. This first year we have gotten quite a few berries, which will increase both next year and the year after that. Then it’s time to plant new ones. So far we are happy with the harvest, but we have had some issues with the berries going bad before we had a chance to pick them. This mostly seems to be caused by the leaves collecting water, and the berries laying in that water for too long. We have covered the soil with straw to prevent mold and such, but it hasn’t helped with this issue. So what we are going to try next year is to add some sort of gratings where the leaves can grow through, and where the berries can be more supported. As of now, the berries are too heavy for the plant to hold them in the air, which hopefully some sort of gratings or net could help with.

One of the other pallet collars contains potatoes and Swiss chard. It has been fine, we have been able to harvest plenty of potatoes and some of the chard. However, while harvesting the potatoes, it was a bit difficult to try and avoid the card and its roots. On top of that, the chard wasn’t very happy about the massive potato leaves that completely took over after a while. It would just be easier if the whole pallet collar were only potatoes. We also have some potatoes in pots, but they aren’t as productive. I think they’d prefer more space. So next year, we will have a pallet collar with only potatoes and plant Swiss chard in the pots instead.

The third pallet collar has carrots and onions. The carrots are looking good; the size is perfect and the taste is great. The onions, however, are a bit small, and don’t seem to be getting much bigger. When planting the seeds, I did follow the guidelines regarding space between, but I do think they would like even more space. So next year, I will make sure to plant them further apart from each other and see if that helps with the size.

The tomato plants seem to be healthy, and we’ve just started harvesting some. Don’t really have anything to add regarding them, other than that we might be even more hands-on next year, helping the flowers with pollination and such.

Overall we’re very pleased with this first year. We low-key prepared ourselves for no harvest at all, since neither of us really had “green fingers” previously. But it has been working well, and most importantly; it has been so much fun!
We are currently trying out some ways of storing; I will make a separate post about that once we find out if it works properly or not. Stay tuned!

Until next time,