Vacation

...until September the first. Unfotunately I had to make a quick decision on this, but it means I can come back in the autumn with more pizazz in my writing. Have a nice summer!

Come hell or high water - I WILL grow my vegetables

It's been tough weeks since my last post about the allotments. I've worked too much, moved too much and cultivated vegetables a lot. Everything in my life has been standing back to everything, and there's always more to do than my time allows. So if you think I sound tired you're right. Today I spent two hours in pourihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifng rain weeding pale persicaria (Persicaria lapathifolia) from Angelina. Since my son have been ill I've been absent from the allotment in an entire week. And I'll pay for it... The persicaria is ruling the place right now. But I splashed my way around the beds removing it from four of them (there's a total of twenty beds). Then I lost my strength and decided I needed to return next day. Didn't feel happy about working on Midsummer's Eve (a big holiday in Sweden), but what can I do? This is an excersise in wearing down the adversary, and I need to see to that right fighter goes down.

We'll meet again, evil persicaria!

Since I've been moving and working I've only had time for Angelina. I don't dare thinking of how Precious and Victoria looks. Anyhow, some time before the winter we'll plant remounting strawberries on Precious. Mmmmmmm strawberries! http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifI asked the kind workers at Funbo Plantskola (local nursery, link in swedish) if they tastes good, since I'm a bit suspicious of fruit cultivated to aquire qualities that have nothing to do with the taste. They were positive; one of the 'parents' of the berry is a domestic wild strawberry and wild strawberries usually are tasty. Hm, let's see if it's true once we can harvest our own. A big advantage is that we can plant the strawberry field any time we like during the season, which gives us some respite.

The plastic cover we put over Victoria last time was suspiciously 'mountaingy' last time I saw it. I think the weed regard it as a nifty cover and thrive under it since we haven't put enough weights on it. Thanks to us moving places we have a lot of cartons I plan to put on the allotment instead, and I've found a place were they need to get rid of a mountain of instant wooden pallets. I got a heap of the pallets a year ago, hoping to build something out of them. Heh. That was the most useless wood I've ever come across. Dry as tinder, splintered to bits as soon as I tried to do anything with it, yet it was surprisingly heavy. In the end I made firewood of it all and gave it to friends with a big house filled with tile stoves. Now it strikes me I can use the pallets as weights weighing down the cardboard I'll put on Victoria. I just need to ask my source if I can bring my tiger saw and cut the pallets at their place.

Part of the pallet wood will become stepping planks for Angelina. It's not fun to work on her in pouring rain. The clay turns into slime that covers the trovels and turns the wellies into gigantic leaden clown shoes. And it's inpossible to keep the paths between the beds in good shape. Instead the muddy boots tear up deep holes and squishis the clay around to form instant mud feet baths. I should've known we'd put out those planks weeks ago, but weeks ago we had a heat wave and I was gardening without woollen* sweater and wet my head and hat to keep my cool. For some reason I thought this weather would stay for the entire summer. Should've known better.

The good news is I've been able to sow on almost all the beds on Angelina. (I had my doubts for a while.) The onions are growing, the potatoes needs ridging, the tomatoes are fruiting and the chard is coming along fine. Even the beds I sowed last week is sprouting seedlings, some of them really muscular. The giant sunflowers I sowed looks something like the land kelp Seymore I and II I grew indoors a while ago. This allotment have a chance to turn out fine.

*Last time I tended an allotment I wound up with pneumonia that kept me on my knees for more than a year. I'm scared to death this will happen again, so I keep my wollen sweater on unless the heat is tropical.

Some like it hot...

We've a heatwave in Sweden, and of course I need to do a lot of heavy work now. I just spent three hours at one of our allotments (Angelina), a quick dash home to do some laundry and avoid the hottest hours of the day and will go out this evening to work some two to three hours more. In case I'd feel bored I can always unpack some boxes or plan the next round of transporting stuff between the old and the new home.

I should give you the next part of my planned book, but my notes have disappeared. Hopefully it was not in the move, and thus they will appear again soon. Bummer anyway. I was about to start at the interesting stuff, like how you choose soil and where to put your 'gardens'. If the notes haven't turned up next week I'll reconstruct them to let you read the part anyway.

For weeding reasons I spend most of my time at the allotment. You see the biggest culprit in the picture above. I have no idea what the name is, but it spreads sending long root wines, hidden deep in the soil, all over the patch. Every time I pay a visit I spend most of the time tearing the plants away, and if I'm lucky I'm able to sow some things too. This day I had enough and decided to work like crazy untill I've been able to put all the planned seeds in the soil (thus my decision to work this evening).

When will I put up my indoor gardens? I'm not sure. July I think. It's not really doable before we've unpacked. So I spend my days eyeing the three windows I can use doing some easy plotting. Perhaps I should plant the dwarf pomegrante tree and the eucalypt! I have the seeds and it'd be nice to have some truly exotic plants.

The Indoor Gardener should be packing...

I seem to have forgotten to update this blog last week. Dumb mistake on my part! I'm spoiled with my other blogs were I can prewrite my posts and have the host publish them at the right date. When Indoor Gardener moves these hickups won't happen again. Kind of doubble, though - the posts won't always be the latest news, but they will be posted in due time, and most often be better than the scribblings I cobble together becauser thursday has arrived and I'm in a hurry.

There's a lot of cobbling in my life. We are spring farming the three allotments and moving to a new place at the same time. The allotments have gotten most of our attention, and now I'm sitting here wondering how on EARTH we are to be able to move the entire household on Saturday. This Saturday. Bit of a luck that we don't have any indoor gardens to move. I try to plan what I'm going to grow in the windows in the new flat, but I find it hard to concentrate on the subject.

Thanks to an impuls purchase I know what to do with the balcony, though. We bought roses for Precious at Funbo Plantskola (link in swedish), and they hade placed grapes close to their roses. I've always wanted to grow grapes. While I was standing in front of the plants I didn't at all remember why I haven't bought one earlier, and picked a hardy labrusca plant. In the car my memory returned when I read the cultivating advice. Labrusca shuns lime. Not what you want when the water is so calciferous it's almost crunchy (or was - nowadays it's soften by the city, but is still rather limy). Luckily enough I've kept some of my big plastic grow crates, and peat moss is cheap.

The Indoor Gardening hubby have been eyeing the domestic arctic brambles every now and then. He's from the nothernmost parts of sweden, and grew up with arctic brambles like southerners do with strawberries. He'd love to have a few plants. Unfortunately they too shun lime, and don't work here at all. My father tried to grow arctic brambles for years in a similar soil. After a long struggle he got one (1) flower on one plant, and no berry. But if I would plant a grape in a big crate on the balcony, why not add some domestic arctic brambles too? They get beautiful, pink flowers that'll match my only fuchsia perfectly. (Only one fuchsia this year - there has to be something wrong with me...) With that my plan for the balcony was more or less finished. For a while I pondered adding american blueberries to the collection. They taste good and want acidic soil too. Then I remembered how BIG the bushes become... A pink balcony filled with grapes, domestic arctic brambles and one fuchsia will do fine.

The rest of the beginning

So, here's the rest of the beginning of the Indoor Vegetable Gardening handbook I'm writing. For my own part I'm packing boxes and planning the tinygardens in the new flat right now.

Something that was both a problem and an advantage was my nack for big and glorious plans. Time and time again I used some of the few pennies left to buy hardware for projects I never finished. Let's just leave these in the closet. On the other hand I'd never become an indoor vegetable gardener had I been the person only messing with sensible projects.

The advantages of indoor vegetable gardening were many. The first one was meningful me-time. My son was one year old when I started the blog Indoor Gardener / Parkettodlaren, and I wrote the first posts while he took his afternoon nap. When he got older gardening turned out to be a perfect task for times when he was awake; he could pour water, taste the seedlings, bury his cars in the soil and even grow some plants on his own. For my own part carrying around heavy soil boxes and big water cans gave me some much needed work out. And my inner gadgeteer had her time with the variuos speciality tools you may need for cultivating things.

As a hobby the indoor vegetable gardening was a success. The family benefitted from the result, and I found it more easy to feed my son vegetables. He didn't really like sallad, but he ate purslane directly from the plant. The strawberries I grew on the balcony proved to be too popular - we had to keep the door firmly shut to prevent him from finish off the unripe fruit.

The blog gave me outlook to the rest of the world. 90% of the gardening blogs I read are written in the US, currently the country with most influence over swedish culture, but the remaining 10% gave me a chance to step outside this sphere. Especially when I started to look at common environmental preservation projects I found amazing stuff. The french, with their taste for coool stuff, turned out to plan buildnings which can brake down pollution and were to be covered in grass. Well, the last thing may not sound so cool, unless you know it's a scyscraper we're talking about. In India I found grass roots projects, some of them usefull for indoor vegetable gardening, and some of them just plain amazing. To build a real garden under the staircase indoors or grow rice on the roof may never be within my reach, but it works in India. In China, a country not known to be environmentally friendly, I found dedicated environmental workers and companies building their business on green technology.

The biggest advantage to indoor vegetable gardening, though, was the vegetables themselves. I'm not a romantic who jumps for joy everytime I come across a homegrown tomato, so I have no scruples in admitting that the taste is not that different between them and storebought ones. On the other hand it was a difference you really noticed. What I didn't know then was that the tomato palnts cleaned the indoor air (which can be dirty) and added moisture to the indoor climate. In addition I could be 100% sure the vegetables were grown without pesticides. Last, but not least, I could pick ingredients for a sallad from my window sills while watching the snow piled high outside.

When I write this I've had a two year pause from indoor vegetable gardening. I'm about to pick up the hobby again, now with better knowledge about plants and indoor climate alike. This book, I hope, will make it possible for more people to become successfull indoor gardeners.


Beginning of the beginning by Malin Nilsson Norén is licensed under a Creative Commons Erkännande-Ickekommersiell-IngaBearbetningar 3.0 Unported License.

First letter from the allotment(s)

Well, we didn't get one allotment, we got three. We got in line for one close to our home, but there were thirty persons waiting to get one on that field. Since I don't take anything for granted I applied for one on a field somewhat less popular, but with allotments in the same size and where we have friends. In April we were called on for a viewing, and we got an allotment in fairly good shape. The previous owner was probably into fancy garden design since she or he had placed the raspberry bushes in the middle, and on one side had planted too many red currant bushes. (In my case anything above zero is too many red currant bushes - I don't like the berries and the bushes is insanely fruitfull. We got three of them to give away - anyone interested?...)

Well, half of the allotment was dug through, and as I said it was in fairly good shape. Its neighbour was in a sorry state however. The owner had fought an heroic fight against the weeds. Fought it and lost, which meant the piece of land was up for grabs. I gave the idea of grabbing it twentyfour hours, and then I decided we would take it too. The Indoor Gardener hubby didn't have much to say about it, I'm afraid, but he hasn't complained yet. When I took a walk around our new 'land' I found onions still in the ground, nettles (quikly harvested for a delicious soup) and sticks marking the places where precious plants had met their fate. I was quick to decide to cover up everything in black plastic for at least two years.

Two weeks later we got a message that there was an allotment available at the field where we originally wanted a place. We went out to have a look, and my hopes weren't high since we had been at the end of the line. Imagine my surprise when we got one which was perfectly clear of weeds, and had beeen propperly fluffed in the autumn. We can do whatever we like with it! Of course I accepted the offer.

What about the first two allotments? Could we wriggle out of the contract? Perhaps, but morally it was out of question. We'd said we'd take care of them, signed the contract and started to work on them, then you just can't throw them away after three weeks. However the two first allotments suddenly got other functions.

To make it more easy to write (and read) about the three allotments apart on this blog I've given them names. I could have given them numbers like x1b2, x2b4 and x3b16, but it felt boring. Instead I gave them three human names. Much more easy to memorise and adds a smidgeon of character to these small pieces of land.

Victoria
This is the allotment formerly covered in weed. Right now it's coverd in black plastic which probably will kill off ground elder, crab grass and other hellish stuff. My grand plan is to replace the plastic with cardboard and straw and plant potatoes in the straw. We have clay soil and this method will choke the weeds while it adds humus. In turn this will soften up a soil that in worst cases acts like concrete. The cardboard layer has to be replaced every year, but I'll be able to grow potatoes in the meantime, and that's a good thing. On the other hand we'll need a LOT of cardboard for this, so when neighbouring alltoment gardeners donated their plastic coverup we were really gratefull.

Precious
This is the allotment in fairly good shape - the one we got first. As I said half of it was dug over, and a rasberry shrubbery was oddly placed in the middle (actually portruding from the middle of the short end) and three red currant bushes (anyone interested?) plus one gooseberry bush. A smaller part is covered up, apparently because of an heavy attack of ground elder. This will be where we grow our berries. We already have raspberries, and I hope to plant a few black currant bushes (three red currant bushes are up for grabs), perhaps a blackberry bush, and a big strawberry field. I'd rather plant raspberries, but our son wanted strawberries and the plants was far cheaper, so I had to give in.

Angelina
The perfectly fluffed allotment last handed to us. (When you garden in clay soil fluffed soil is what you dream for.) Angelina will be cultivated according to a modified variety of jidutu xiangchuan (a tradition more than a thousand years old). Since an allotment is comparatively small (six times ten meters / eighteen times thirty feet) I had to scrap some of the details to save space. This is ok, since jidutu is very pragmatic. Here we'll cutlivate our vegetables, although so far I've just meassured were the beds will be, and promised our allotment neighbour she'll get her sticks back by Saturday. Since she was the prevous owner of Angelina and saw to fluff up the soil I also thanked her. Many times.

(Yes, I know most of you haven't heard of jidutu xiangchuan - I'l go into depts about it in the future.)

So, these are the three pieces of land the entire Indoor Gardener family will battle this summer. Tomorrow we'll spend the entire day watering and sowing on Angelina. If we're lucky we'll manage to plant some bushes on Precious too. (Anyone wants red currant bushes?)

[Sorry about the belated update - computer problems.]

First part of the beginning

So, here's the first part of the beginning of the handbook I'm writing. I'm splitting it into screen reading appropriate parts, since this chapter turned out to be a bit long. This is the crude text I'll revise a few times before I put everything together. The good thing about that is that you can add pointers and ask for things missing if you want it in the book. NOTE: If anyone know anything more than me about Joy O.I. Spoczynska I'll be really happy if you tell me in the comments. Appart from her being born 1922, coming from Canada or England and being an entomologist I haven't found a thing.

When I started to grow vegetables indoors I was mostly alone. I had a predecessor in canadian Joy O I Spoczynska who wrote books about self sufficiency in a flat during the seventies and eighties. Apart from that there were little about ”normal” gardening - you could find a lot about hydroponics and similar that craves special gears, but little information on vegetables in ordinary pots. There was litterature on growing herbs indoors, and when I made a small survey on the different gardening forums I frequent (Odla.nu and Alternativ.nu - both swedish) that was what most indoor gardeners grew. But a few had tried other things, and that made me press on with my odd experiment. When I write this indoor vegetable gardening is beginning to catch on in Sweden. At the Nordic Gardens fair ”the Indoor Garden” was a best seller - a steel box with a plant light and water ciculating to make it possible to grow herbs on the window sill. Yes, it's herbs again and it is a slow process, but it's still a start.

In the beginning I had a lot of problems. The worsts were my own lazyness and procrastination and lack of knowledge. I handled the lazyness by starting a blog (Indoor Gardener / Parkettodlaren) to document my experiment. If I hade promised to the world to show what happened I would feel bound to keep up the work, was my theory. It worked for several years. The lack of knowledge was worse. I hadn't been gardening for several years, and didn't know anything about what critters and illnesses could affect vegetables. If something happened I didn't notice, and if I did notice I didn't know what to do.

It was more fun to work out the perfect crops. I had to do it through trial and error, which made a perfect excuse to buy too many seeds of different varieties. Mostly I chose the exact wrong vegetable. For exemple I wanted root vegetables, since I don't like sallad. But to grow one carrot per pot was not a effective way to use the scarce space available. For a while I grew turnips, but gave them too much fertilizer. The leaves turned out thick and green, and the root became a chewy and stringy... string. I never started any potatoes, since I by then had worked out that I couldn't provide any working grow light for it. On the other hand the turnip leaves turned out to be tasty in gravy and tiny carrot leaves are a palatable replacement for sallad.

Vegetables that grew too big was an experince of its own. Since we are permanently low on money I tried to save as much as I could. Part of that was to plant some seeds from a tomato I bought for our sallads. The seedling grew into two meter (or six foot) monsters who bombed their suroundings with cherry tomatoes. (They were placed on a window sill in a room where the ceiling was five meters (fifteen feet) above the floor, which meant the fruits could come from a height of more than three meters (nine feet). When I was done contemplating an indoor helmet I cut the plants down, and replaced them with tomatoes cultivated specially for small spaces; Tiny Tim.

The new tomato plant were provided with company - two seedlings of land kelp. The crop seemed promising when I read about it in the seed catalogue, high yielding and such. Only when the plants started to grow I learned that they could grow vines as long as fifty meters (150 feet). Luckily enough they didn't get that far, but they became big. I got lots of leaves from them, and they sent vines behind the sill, the wall papers and between the walls and the window case. The big harvest was a curse, since no one in the family liked the taste. Three years later I still have frosen land kelp leaves in the freezer.

My last problem was the recycling. I didn't have the heart to throw away perfectly good soil when I'd used it only once. And all those twigs and leaves I had to remove could certainly go into a compost. So I set up a vermicompost and started to heat sterilize the soil in our stove. It worked. I had a crude circular flow of soil and plants going, but it took up space and drained my energy which meant my interest for gardening regularly crashed.


Indoor Vegetable Gardening Handbook, beginning pt 1 by Malin Nilsson Norén is licensed under a Creative Commons Erkännande-Ickekommersiell-IngaBearbetningar 3.0 Unported License.

Next week will probably be an epic tale of our strife at our allotments, and the week after that you'll read the rest of the beginning; the advantages with growing vegetables indoors.