This post is a very special one for us because within less than a year we’ve gone from hardly cooking at home and always eating out to growing a good portion of our food from seed, cooking it (a challenge on its own) and also preserving it!
The failures were numerous really and occurred at all the different stages of the process, but we are convinced that we ‘saved’ as much as we spent (on seeds, seedlings, compost, gardening tools) – let alone that is was all super fresh, organic and a great learning experience (for our tastebuds too, that is).
Future posts will focus on more details around the different planting methods we tried, different recipes that worked (those that didn’t, produced at least a decent meal for our chicken 😉 ) etc., but we definitely don’t want our second post to become too much of a ‘cooking blog entry’ or something alike; that’s just not us.
The dirty bit
Literally, we started with dirt. No, not just dirt as in soil. Dirt, garbage, waste, that sort of dirt. The house, as well as the land surrounding it, were neglected for several years and why a lovely lady took good care of the animals that remained here, the garden was left untouched. Sort of. Waste that was flying in from neighbouring fields, old pieces of metal, mash, glass and and and were accumulating and we had to go through a lot of tidying up before being able to properly plant into the soil…
Sowing vs cheating
In theory, starting a garden from seeds sounds so logical and easy: put the seed in the ground, water it, watch the plant growing, enjoy, harvest, collect seeds, repeat.
Ready to sow – you can’t see all the hard work that went into it…
Ha! Well, it might actually be that easy but for us, this method failed most of the times in the beginning. Either we watered too much or too little or when we got that right the weeds took over:
Sometimes we didn’t have anything sprouting and while we are not clear about all of the causes climate was definitely one issue: the standard seeding calendar was not applicable to our circumstances.
Tomatoes are in
Some success – salad, carrots and spinach for beginners
We did not want to end up starving though (let alone the gossip in the village 😉 ), so we started educating ourselves which weeds on our ground were actually edible and tasty! Jackpot, it worked out well! So here you have the answer to why there are so many pictures with purslane 😉
The outcome – not foodporn yet but still…
So here’s our (picture) summary of our gardening and harvest year which started a bit more than one year ago. (Oh yes, we are in Greece so it’s perfectly possible to start growing in November 😉 ).
