Poll wrap up

Yo man! Wanna buy tomatoes?...

The poll about what to plant in the gigantic pot is closed since a few days. My wrap up have been delayed by a balcony project though. We are halfway through furnishing the balcony with a pergola, fruit garden, playground and pool.

Well, the poll. A long time I thought it would end with a tie between the international readers of Indoor Gardener and the swedish readers of Parkettodlaren. Strawberries for the kiddo took the lead, closely followed by ulluco and ordinary houseplant. Then some more votes were cast and the result was

Indoor Gardener; Strawberries
Parkettodlaren; Ulluco

If you combine the votes of both blogs the result is

Strawberries 4 votes
Ulluco 4 votes
Potted plant 2 votes
Potatoes 1 vote
Tiger nut 0 vote
Put it away 0 vote

A tie in other words. Since ulluco is extremely hard to come by in Sweden I opted for strawberries. Today I bought ten new plants at Funbo Plantskola (as well as I shot the picture of the garden gnomes). Now I only have to sterilize ca 50 litres (12 gallons) to plant them. This will take time, since I only have two soil pots, and the biggest of them holds 5 litres (1.2 gallons).

Still not a vegetable, though...

I have a friend who knows a good pot when she sees one. This one has been standing at her home with a gigantic houseplant inside. Unfortunately she's moving to another part of Sweden and has gifted me, a very happy indoor gardener, with it (this is not a manipulated photo - I do fit in there).

Now I'm pondering two things. A; where to put it, since I don't have a spare corner for it, and B; what to plant inside. I've decided to ask you to help me come to a decision. To the right you find a small poll, you have a week to answer and the help is deeply appreciated. The pot is deep enough for potatoes, although the fruits are poisonous (twoyearold in da house). Or perhaps I should call the Uppsala University Botanical Gardens and ask if they can sell me some ulluco to plant, so I can try this mythic plant at last. Another alternative is to buy loads of strawberryplants to satiate the sweet tooth of my son even during the winter. On the other hand, if I plant tiger nuts I can provide him with a toy lawn and the family some cooking oil (if I ever can figure out how to extract it).

Thankyou Irene, Johan and Anders for all your precious gifts! We'll miss you much in Uppsala - good thing we know where you live... :-)

Impecta

When you are into gardening you have to buy your seeds from somewhere. There's a lot of firms available, Thompson and Morgan for exemple. Good enough if you want ordinary plants, but if you are like me, and want to do things the most complicated way, then you'll probably want an retailer selling something extra.

Impecta is a firm like this. They specialises in old swedish traditional crops, but you can find almost anything there. For exemple I read about the tiger nut in an article (the tiger nut is almost unknown Sweden) where I was recommended to buy seeds from french retailers, if I wanted to grow some. ”Haha!” I thought and went to the webpage of Impecta. Yup! They got it. They also have Canary Islands dragon tree, tuberous pea and strawberrysticks, if that's what you want. The only thing I haven't find in their online shop is ulluco. They don't have it - yet.

So, if you are of swedish ancestry and are looking for swedish traditional crops, Impecta's online shop is well worth a visit. Unfortunately the pages is in swedish only, but they do sell to countries outside Sweden and you can most certainly email questions to them in english – most swedes are pretty good at this language. If you are searching for particular crops they always list their seeds on both common and latin name.