Thursday 31 March 2011

Tomato relocation time

Time for this batch of tomatoes to move into bigger homes.

Snow White, Lemon Bay & nameless orange sort
Mise en place
Purdy
The first one having a drink
All done :)



Wednesday 30 March 2011

Lime tree owner at last

I've been searching for a lime tree, to complete my Mojito Garden, for well over a year. More actively for the past couple of months. I've enquired with five different garden centres and even called citrus importers, but no-one seems to supply lime trees. Very strange. Plenty of lemons and baby oranges. No limes.

So imagine my surprise when I found this little lady at Solhaga Garden Centre in Kungsbacka yesterday:

Tuesday 29 March 2011

Chilies and photoshop experiments

You may have noticed that I've changed the design of my blog. I've started regularly reading other gardening blogs and they're all so pretty! So I thought I'd have a go at sprucing mine up.

But it's not just the actual blog, even the photos and frames are so nice. I really don't know how they do it, but I managed to find a photoshop app that does this to my photos:

My gorgeous Congo Black plants (sown 23 Nov)

My only surviving (and slightly burnt) Bih Jolokia (sown 11 Jan)

My purdy Aurora (sown 14 Jan)

Monday 28 March 2011

Noisy weekend, lots of firewood

It's been a noisy weekend here at Åslyckan - my husband is taking a chainsaw course and they held their practical experience bit here over the weekend (the first of three!! :/ )

A bunch of chainsaw maniacs in the back garden
A bunch of chainsaw maniacs in the west facing 'garden' (actually it's still a forest at the moment - but we have big plans...)
They felled this huge aspen, which took us hours to take care of once they'd left
Although it was noisy, they felled a total of 19 trees in two days, most of which they even cut up into logs for us! Can't complain... Mind you, after three weekends of this and about 60 trees to take care of, I don't think I'm going to be quite as delighted...

Wednesday 23 March 2011

Books books books :)

I've just ordered a stack of books:
Growing Tomatoes (top), Vegetable Growing (left) and The Easily Maintained Kitchen Garden (right)

And have an order pending for this one, which will be sent to me as soon as the new edition is available:
The Kichen Garden Handbook

I made a new gardening friend this week, you see, who has an amazing library full of kitchen garden books. Despite them being fairly new, she was kind enough to lend me a pile so I could decide which ones I wanted to buy. All of them of course... :D


Thursday 17 March 2011

Fresh garlic leaves

Someone on Odla.nu (a Swedish gardening site) suggested growing a few garlic cloves indoors, for use as a chive (gräslök for all you Swedes) substitute until the season gets underway. So I stuffed a few (garden centre) garlic cloves into a couple of pots in the kitchen a few days ago... and look! They've started sprouting already!! :D


Wednesday 16 March 2011

My Mojito Garden!!!

The bastards have turned my mint garden upside down! (By bastards I mean wild boar)


This is what it looked like last year:
:'(

Sunday 13 March 2011

Poor quality film of the wild boar

The quality of the films I uploaded in my last entry was really poor, sorry about that. I uploaded them directly from Blogger and you can hardly see a thing...

I've now uploaded them onto YouTube instead:

Wild boar in the back garden 12 March 2011

Wild boar surrounding the car 22 February 2011

Saturday 12 March 2011

Here we go again...


Although it looks like there are a lot of them, which of course there are, there are definitely fewer than there were a few weeks ago (taken 22 Feb):


They're not particularly shy either...


Friday 11 March 2011

Handsome fella

Check out this pretty chap that just sauntered past my office window... :)




 




Wednesday 9 March 2011

Another go from my phone

I'm lying in bed, just about to go to sleep and I thought I'd have another go at posting an entry...

Tuesday 8 March 2011

Salad, rocket & coriander

This time of year is really frustrating for us veg growers and an irritating time of year for anyone that has to live with us. The window sills are full of straggly little things desperately looking for sunshine.

Having ordered so many exciting seeds promising to deliver tasty lettuces etc in just 2-3 weeks, how could I resist... :) This lot went into the soil on 15th Feb:

Mixed rocket

Stir fry mix leaf salad

Italian mix leaf salad
A tray of coriander, a popular ingredient in this house

Monday 7 March 2011

Onion/garlic update March 2011

Admittedly it's an improvement on last year's attempt, but thing's are moving reeeeaaally slowly.
Apache red salad onion babies
Leek babies

And thanks to the fleece it's been under all winter, the garlic is starting to sprout :)

Garlic sown in Oct 2010



Sunday 6 March 2011

Chilli update March 2011

Just spent the past three hours repotting chillies, which would have been ok but it was in my dressing gown on at 7am on a Sunday morning... Big time middle age warning!!

Anyhoo, here are some pickies of them.