I’m hardening out my first crops to be planted after the frost this Thursday. The plants are getting a bit big and I’m hoping they will be able to hang on another few more days.
Tuesday and Wednesday have hard frosts overnight and then no more frosts on the forecast – fingers crossed.
I’m going to invest in a green house in fall. I don’t have the patience to play this game with the weather.
In my keeness to get planting, I have planted my early broad beans too early. In Mid January we had a warm spell and so I thought I would benefit by planting out the broad beans that had grown well in the greenhouse.
The last 3 nights have had hard frosts and there’s more to come. I expect to lose most of this crop and so I have sown some more as backup.
I’m sowing a vast amount of seed this year. I’ve invested over €300 into seeds for the season. It is now mid February and I am halfway through my sowing schedule.
Space is soon going to become an issue but I cannot plant anything because the weather is still too cold. Hoping for a change in the next week or two.
It’s the summer solstice tomorrow so I thought I’d do a general update.
Things are growing well. The salads have been the most successful with plenty more than we can consume. The tomatoes are looking to be pretty decent too.
Both chickens are still alive and laying on average about 1.5 eggs a day. All 25 fish are going strong and have grown significantly.
I’m building a new floating raft bed that should be about 3x the size of my existing one so that I can dial up my aquaponics salads and basil. Once I get that going I’m going to test différent types of salads for a bit of variety.
I’ve been servicing my compost in preparation for a fall planting of winter crops.
But it’s not all good news. It seems my potatoes got sick and I lost 2 out of the three plantings.
New salads going in this evening.
I was just out, closing up for the evening and feeding the fish when it struck me that the tomatoes bushes are really huge.
There seems to be a large number of potential tomatoes too.
Many of my young plants were getting massacred by slugs and so before I transplanted my next phase of salads I wanted to slug proof the beds.
So first I placed tubs with sugar water (as previously described), I then laid down a boarder of spickey mulch that I harvested from local park.
Last of all, I added a fence so the chickens don’t piss me off when we let them out.
As I mentioned in another post, my spring so wings of radishes was a bit of a failure, as I simply did not plant enough radishes.
So this time, I’m hoping I planted enough. But I’ll keep planting more as I see the success rate.
Either Way, below is the last harvest of stragglers and a photo of the new radish bed.
I harvested my first full salad from the aquaponics. To be fair I could have harvested it weeks ago. And in fact by not harvesting and leaving it bunched up it has been forced to grow up rather than out.
Nonetheless it’s a nice looking salad. I love the length of the roots.
We got our first tomatoe growing. The tomatoes are going nuts. And it looks like we’ll have a few so need to do some research on how to tie them up to avoid more damage like last time.
We’ve recently had challenges with slugs on our salads. At first I was getting up early, plucking them from our make salads and feeding them to the chickens.
But now they are eating all the young salads we’re replanting and killing them before they can take. Literally 100% of the recently planted salads are gone. So before I plant a fresh batch of juvenile salads I want to try to protect them.
Hence this slug trap experiment. Honey water in a tray. The plan is that this will attract them, and every morning I should be able to harvest them.
Will see. If it works, will experiment with something more substantial.
Bonsaiponics 