Garden ” DIY Fertilizer from kitchen leftovers

This is slowly becoming a garden blog, but I promise soon this will change. It’s just that time of the season where things happen in the garden daily – sometimes small things, sometimes bigger things. Today a small thing happened. I made my first DIY fertilizer.

I was watching my favorite belgian garden guy online and he visited a belgian actress who shared her secret DIY fertilizer recipe with him and I will share it below with you. I rarely watch “tv” these days, but when I do I’m mostly watching belgian tv and generally it’s about gardening or survival in the wild kind of things. Slowly I’m also developing a belgian accent, I wish I picked up french as quickly, but maybe I should start watching french garden shows. If you have any good garden/nature shows I should watch that are spoken in french, please let me know.

Anyhow back to the fertilizer!

What do you need:

• banana peels
• egg shells
• coffee residu
• water
• blender

What do you do:

And then, just place everything in the blender, close it, keep your hand on top and just mix it up for a minute or three. And you’re done! I briefly considered using a different blender than the one that I used for food stuff. But then I thought about it a second longer and decided I was being crazy, since the only thing that I use in the blender are things that are pretty “normal” and couldn’t be of any danger of my food blender if I just was it normally afterwards. I don’t know the fertilizer somehow made me think *iewuk* for a split second.

Now you just pour the fertilizer you made in the watering can and add some extra water to it so that it’s more easy to spread where you want to spread it in the garden. I used it on a bed where the plants were pretty “down” looking and needed some extra power. I also did it right before I expected it to rain (which it didn’t :S). The fertilizer will have some small chunks in it, and you might find it difficult to pour from a watering can with small holes, if so, just use one with one big hole. Afterwards just clean your blender and your watering can and you are ready to go.

I’ve tried to find some more information about why banana peels etc are good for your garden and you can find several different sources that say it’s for example good for roses to use banana peels. Coffee grind and egg shells are more commenly used, you can also place those two in your composting unit, you can’t do that with banana’s. So this way we found another way to use our trash in a more sustainable way – me thinks. I think I’ll make more of these mixes soon for our rose bushes down in the garden. I first need to figure out what mix works best for them. If you use this, don’t use too much of it and especially only use a tiny little bit if you use it in pots, it’s too concentrated for pots generally. It works better in open fields I read.

I’ll update you on some miraculous growth if I see something interesting that happens in that crappy looking bed. If you are also making your own fertilizer from leftovers in the kitchen, please share some secrets with me. I’m very willing to learn.

Food ” Wintery summer dish

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you todays view from our house! Haunting, isn’t it? It’s so amazing, I love it, the city is all lightened up and white due to the contrast and dark sky. It’s almost like we are looking from behind a black & white filter.

But clearly not a very summery view. So today I made a in between winter and summer dish. It’s a bit heavy – with mostly canned veggies – fitting to the wintery wet weather and a bit fresh to compensate the weather. It tastes perfectly and it’s quick, so worth sharing with you.

Ingredients (for +/- 2 people):

• young potatoes (200 gr)
• chickpeas (one small can +/- 100 gr)
• artichokes (one small can +/- 100 gr)
• chopped tomatoes (one small can +/- 100 gr)
• fresh thyme (1 teaspoon)
• fresh rosemary (2 teaspoons)
• fresh oregano (1 teaspoon)
• salt (to taste)
• pepper (to taste)
• cucumber (for the salad)
• balsamico (for the salad)

Cook the potatoes (in their skins) with some salt in water for about 15 minutes. Prepare an oven dish in the meantime and grease it in with some olive oil (be generous). Place the chickpeas, artichokes, tomatoes and the herbs (all cut) in the oven dish and when the potatoes are ready cut them all in half (if they aren’t very small already) and also place them in the dish. Then hustle everything together, place it in your oven at 200 degrees celsius for another 30 minutes.
While that is preparing, cut a cucumber in slices and mix it up with some balsamic vinegar and salt. Now you are ready to serve.

It tasted so good that I decided to try to regrow some of the potatoes we used in the dish, against all odds, since march/april are more usual months for planting potatoes. I will try anyway. Below you can see how you – apparently – should plant potatoes in plastic bags.

You need some soil, a few old soil bags and some sprouting potatoes (now this is not the right potato I’m using and it’s also not sprouted, that’s something that’s not advisory). I also took a knife and sliced one of the potatoes in half to see if the method of slicing-the-potato in half works better than the other methods (aghum, I clearly didn’t mark the bag I’m realising now ;)). Anyway, you turn the bags inside out. When I read that instruction I thought – ah, that’s probably to make the bag look more appealing, but turned out not to be the reason. It’s creating a darker environment for the potato and potato likes dark environments.

You place 15 cm of soil and then a (sliced) potato and then again the same amount of soil (you can also place some more potatoes and more soil for the first time – I’m going for it conservatively today). Push it a bit, add some water and you’re done. If  you do it with the right potato and at the right time of the year you will get some greens, then you place again some soil on top to create more roots so that you get more potatoes in the end.

When the growing season is done, you just open the bag and collect your potatoes. I wonder if we’ll get any crop out of this, but it’s a nice and pretty cheap experiment. I’ll keep you posted! For the dutchies, my favorite belgian garden guy explains all this potato stuff more accurately.

Garden ” Seedling mess

Extremely short post today. I’ve worked a full workday today at this table – pfff – very gratifying, but I’m happy that it’s now done for a week or two. I needed to clear up the seedlings mess I created during these last couple of months. I started arranging my seeds this year early, already in january. I started seeding early with some old seeds I had, to get rid of them with this season. But because I wanted to get rid of them, I used too many seeds and then I also forgot to give the seeds water (which Eduards father reminded me of), next to this the seeds were lying on the floor and the floor is ice cold in our house (stone). Al these things combined meant that now four months later I have some seedlings that came out perfectly, some that didn’t come out, but most of them came out but are now a mess.

Today I decided that I had all materials in-house to solve this problem and I that’s why I spend the whole day at this table (and partly in the veggie garden). De-messing the mess. Giving these green guys some room. I could plant them out in the garden as well, but they are too small and fragile and therefore I decided to give them some room in bigger pots with some seedlings soil. Hopefully they will recover from my bad upkeeping.

I also took the time to clean up our terrace and place some new/old pots and fill them with some new seeds and flowers. These were again some seeds that we had lying around that I now could use. Seeds are popular merch give-aways, even on nerdy physics conferences. Let’s see if they really produce some proper herbs.

As said, eight hours later and 200 liters of new soil all was done. Part of it was something I had to do anyway, but part of it was useless if I paid more attention earlier down the road. So if you are a garden rookie as I am, first lesson (well after you have chosen your seeds) is that you only need to use the amount of seeds that you want to have plants for in the end, and then add a few extra, but not 50 extra (except if you are planning on having 100 plants, then you might want to do 50 extra for security reasons ;)).

But well, it’s all a learning experience, so next year I’ll do this better and since I have to make new seedlings every two/three weeks, I can bring this lesson into practice even sooner.

And then at the end of the day after working first and then working in the garden next, I really didn’t want to cook as well, so I whipped up a quick but tasty quiche! The recipe you ask? I don’t use those as said earlier, but it was something like this:

Ingredients:

• quiche dough
• aubergines conserved in oil (from a supermarket jar in this case, but you can also just make your own)
• two table spoons of the aubergine oil
• lentils (drained from a can)
• two eggs
• 50ml milk
• half cube of veggie “stock”
• three teaspoons of thyme

Place dough in quiche tray (put some oil between the dough and the tray). Drain the lentils, drain the aubergines (keep the oil). Place the aubergines on the dough, place the lentils on top of the aubergines. Mix the egg, milk, veggie stock-cube and two tablespoons of aubergine oil. Pour the mix on top of the lentils in the quiche. As finishing touch spread the thyme on top of everything. Place the quiche in the oven. Bake it for 30-40 minutes on 180 degrees (celsius). Eat it with some yoghurt or a salad, it’s delish and easy!

Garden wise, next thing will be making more beds in the garden and organising all the seeds for the upcoming seeding periods. I kind of always just made seedlings once, since we only had a small balcony, but now with the luxury of a real garden, we can have crops all year long, so we also have to seed all year with some intervals. Exciting, especially after we just had our first lettuce, will post that update later on. Goodnight!

Garden ” A lot has happened

A lot has happened the past week or so, and therefore a lot didn’t happen at the same time. One of the things that didn’t happen, was me updating this blog. So, as we speak I’m typing out five different blogposts to entertain you during the week. Some posts about things I promised to post like the capers from dandelion buds for example, but also some general updates on my search on finding a perfect way of living for example, on our trip to Switzerland this past weekend and I’ll start off with an update on our garden, because it’s showing some signs of life and that makes me happy – or satisfied – or keeps me entertained at least.

As said, we did a short trip to Switzerland this weekend, since it was a long holiday weekend here in France due to some christian holidays and liberation day. Eduard had to give a talk yesterday in Stuttgart (Germany) and we decided to combine both and take a bit of a break, since we didn’t have a proper holiday for a long time (this wasn’t a proper holiday, but it will keep us energised till we get one). So on our way to Stuttgart, we visited Geneva, Bern and Lucerne. But I’ll tell you more about this in a later post. Because today is about gardening!

Now I see you scratch your head, this isn’t our garden, you are right. This is – I imagine – a community garden in Bern. I was so impressed by it a few days ago, that I couldn’t stop making pictures. It’s all I want my garden to be, all it will never be. It’s so organised – so Swiss – just perfect. While standing on top of the wall looking over this garden I literary only could drool over it.

What I found most inspiring was that in a cramped city, where things were definitely not built to set up a garden, people do find ways to grow vegetables in the city. This is a perfect example of city gardening. Also – again I’m only imagining this – I find it kind of nice to see that probably that big house on the background once owned this big lot and now it’s sort of given back by the community.

I can be totally wrong, since we didn’t have a tour guide, so I’m just romancing away about gardens in the city of gingerbread rooftops.

Now these inspiring gardens bring me back to our own garden – the village garden. Just before we left Eduard made some new beds in the garden and I cleaned out some wild plants, but before I could place some new things in them it started to pour. So we left it like it was – and I crossed my fingers that when we would come back, miraculously the plants would have doubled in size. Most of them didn’t, surprise – surprise.

Inspired by the Bern gardens I decided to plant some more of the seedlings we had lying around ready to be planted. We now have five beds and half of the garden is dug up I think. It’s growing organically. Although I had big and very precise – swiss like – plans . Yeah, I even drew a map of the garden. Soon we found out that some parts of the garden were pretty un-duggable. So now we just dig as we go and stop where there is too much force from below. ;)

It looks now like the picture above. The view above is from the gate of the vegetable garden. That’s where you walk into the vegetable garden.

We’ve planted some haricots at the beginning, then some corn and then after that you move on to the cabbages. Below you can see the view from the other side. On the left of the cabbages I’ve planted some courgettes and a lost pumpkin (or five ;)). Probably I haven’t given them enough space, but we’ll see. I kind of assume it will be ok. I’m also still working on the stone-marking, I’m halfway or so.

This back part of the garden under the apple tree is more familiar with you I guess, I’ve blogged about it earlier as well (1, 2). These beds have had some more time to grow and there is a lot happening in there. Lot of good things and some wildlings trying to set foot on ground as well.

The lettuce is for example ready to be picked. So this week we will probably eat something from our new garden for the first time. Below you can see some tomato plants, ones we bought (the big ones) and tiny ones that came form seeds. There are also some bigger pepper plants there and a lot of wild plants, which I can’t really remove because I’m not always sure if they should be there or not ;).

Before I started this garden I read a lot about vegetable gardening, one of the things that you can find a lot of information on is how to keep bugs away from the crops. If you want to go green, an advised method is to mix everything up – to let go of the rows and just mix and match colours and types of leafs, consistencies etc etc. This would confuse the bugs and even if they would find the type of plant that they like to eat up, they probably can’t find enough of it close to the first piece they found to survive with a whole colony. So the damage would be only small.

I thought that this above method would fit me. I could randomly, chaotically place things in the garden and then things would be ok. It sounded like a win win situation.

Unfortunatly that’s not the case. If crops are difficult to find for bugs because they are placed randomly in the garden, then probably they are difficult to find for you as well. Especially if you are doing some weeding and want to know if something belongs there or doesn’t belong there. This above method is probably not meant for the intuitive gardner, but would fit better with the organised more advanced gardner that can recognise seedlings and also maps out where every individual plant will grow.

I went back to the simple rows (as you can see above. You can much easier spot things that shouldn’t be there, due to the clear line of the seedlings. And bugs? Well we’ll see, we won’t use any chemical things, I guess if something gets totally eaten, we will just learn from it for next year. Since there wasn’t a garden in this space for years, I assume most of the insects don’t have a fresh memory of where to find yummy beans, carrots, beets and whatever else. I hope at least…

So much for the garden update. But before I close up the blogpost. I have two questions some of you might be able to answer. From now on I hope to post more updates more regularly on the garden. They will be less chunky, I promise ;)

And then the questions, I wonder if you know…

1. We have a few bushes like the one above in our garden and they are a bit in the way. Before we take them away, we are kind of wondering what they are. Do you maybe know? The flower looks a bit like jasmin, but I think it’s a bit smaller.
2. While weeding out things in the garden I found this root like plant. the top part looks like greens from a carrot. The root smells very much like a carrot, but it’s wild and it definitely isn’t orange (like most carrots). Any idea what it might be? I made a few pictures so that you can have a good look at it.

Garden ” City folks

It’s going to be a full post today, but I’ve been quiet for a week, so that’s ok right? It’s not a post about this whole week, but mostly about today actually. Summer has kicked in – in spring – so we have been quite active outside our house and I therefore would like to show you how much progress we have made in our garden – or potager as the french would say.

But before I do that let me show you these cute flowers that have been growing in our garden. About a week and a half ago our gardner called Eduard that he was going to come by to cut our grass because it needed some trimming. The day before I had just told Eduard that I hoped that the gardner wouldn’t come by any time soon, since our whole grass field was filled with these cute little flowers. Didn’t work – he called the day after about an half hour before he entered our garden asking us if we could open the gate for him. So when Eduard mailed me with the news, I didn’t open the gate, but ran out to “save” the flowers first. I wasn’t sure if they were going to survive inside, but it was worth the try, otherwise they would end up under the trimming machine anyway. I managed to do this right on time and opened the gate for the nice gardner. He must have been surprised to see an empty flowerless field ;-) But I was content, it even brightened me up a bit that afternoon. These flowers have been in our house now for almost two weeks and they look still this pretty. I’m amazed, sometimes you buy flowers that are meant to keep inside your house and they die on you within a week, these guys on the other hand are apparently grow outside, but prefer the indoors ;).

Our sprouts on the other hand have left the indoors this week, since the weather forecast is very promising and some of the sprouts really needed to be planted in the permanent bed as well. Besides that there is of course such a thing as external pressure in the form of seing all your neighbors in the village work on their gardens, so you need to as well. It’s called integrating. ;)

So I decided to make some garden signs made out of ice cream popstickles first. It was going to be a great DIY tutorial where I explained how to burn letters into wood with old lead letters. It was a great idea, but it failed, you can find the results below. I decided to share it anyway since the internet is full with great DIY, but misses out on those great failed tutorials. On to Plan B! Plan B was going back to basic and just writing out the signs – and learning some french while I was at it. Which looks nice as well, but won’t result into a tutorial as you can understand ;).

With the little signs on hand we went up again to our potager to dig out another garden bed and to plant some of the seedlings. Today we planted the onions, carrots, some of the tomat0′s and peppers and the beans. Tomorrow I’ll do a second round with things that I will plant immediately in the soil. It’s really a hassle to sprout things first and then put them in the ground, especially when you don’t have to (or when it’s better not to). So that was another learning moment. The garden is now again far from finished, but it’s looking better don’t you think?

It’s pretty dry outside already and it’s not going to improve seing the weather forecast, so we have to find a watering schedule that will be proficient enough to keep everything growing. Two things on our to do list now: 1. buy a XXXL water hose and 2. find a way to collect water that falls down when it rains so we can use it when it’s a more dry period. This second part is tricky, since we live in a rented house, so we can’t really mold the house to our means, but who knows maybe we can come up with something. I’ll keep you posted on this.

So that’s our Saturday so far, I’m writing this post while we are sitting in our porch drinking fresh abricot sirup and eating a pain with chevre. At the same time our orchard started to bloom this week. So life is good, the goods definitely balance out the bads.

What we did find out today though is that we could be definitely described as city folks, the picture below of Eduards hand – that shows the result of the shoveling in the garden – is a proof of that. Let’s see how this evolves over two years. I’ll keep you updated on that as well.

Garden ” Fresh starts

Remember the seeds I blogged about a few months ago? I planted some more in the meantime and as you can see above, most of them are becoming real plants rapidly. The beans above are definitely ready to be placed outside in a garden bed. Unfortunately the veggie garden was not ready yet.

The designated place for veggies in our garden was converted into a swimmingpool area by the people that lived in the house before us. So when they left, they took away the swimming pool and left something that could be best described as a desert build on a piece of plastic. A while ago we pulled away the biggest part of the plastic that was lying under the sand and on top of the soil, but that was so much work that we didn’t make the soil ready for planting. That was supposed to be the next step, which would become more urgent when the sprouts would start sprouting…. which they are doing now vividly!

So today Eduard continued his work and the big shoveling began. The whole veggie garden is around 14,5x6m. Today we finished around 2×2,5m. Eduard opened up the soil and I collected stones in the garden to mark the beds and marked the walking routes around it with the old desert sand which was lying under the swimmingpool.

This is how the bed looks now. There is some lettuce growing in it – these were seedlings I bought in the store so not grown from scratch. But they give you an idea about how it will be later on during the process. This is one of the beds planned in the area. There will be around 8 beds, all in different sizes. But we are taking it one at a time. Soon the veggie garden will be back on track again and will forget the short period that it was converted into a swimmingpool.

We are really so excited about the garden. In a few months we can pick apples, cherries, walnuts, veggies, flowers, herbs and what more from our own (rented) piece of land.

This last week I’ve been realizing that I’ve postponed too many “good things in life” for things that were less good. You only realize this when you change your routine and start doing new things you have postponed for all the good bad reasons. I believe turning 32 this week gives me enough reason to toast to fresh starts.

Keep a close eye on this blog to find out what this fresh start will entail for me personally.

France ” Sundays walk

It’s Sunday and on Sunday you are supposed to do a Sunday’s walk. Both of us were a bit busy though so we decided not to go out for a ride and then do some walking, but just to walk around in our own village – or actually, just a walk around our house (you can see our house in the pictures above) – , which we rarely do, so there were still some roads that we were able to discover for the first time. I took the opportunity to make some pictures and also to pick up some things along the way.

I’m not sure I’ve told you before, but we very often hear the sound of donkeys around our house, I had actually never really seen them and I thought there were somewhere deeper down in the village, it turns out that they are actually our upper neighbours and with a bit of luck can be seen from our back garden. They are with three and are quite social – at least one of them, who came up to us and when we walked away did some impressive jumps – of which I unfortunately don’t have any pictures. So it never happened ;)

One thing that also keeps amazing me are the mosses that grow on our front garden wall. You can see the wall in the picture above. The mosses are really colourful, even in winter time. I remember that I had books full with pictures of how-to-make-your-own-rock-garden and now I don’t have to do anything, it’s already there, I can just enjoy looking at it and make pictures and in late summer cut some lavender off to place in our house. Joy!

During our walk I brought also some things back to the house, by the lack of a real dog in our household I sometimes am the dog in the family and bring back sticks and stuff like pine cones. I found this beautiful stick for which I have plans. It’s such a beauty, please look at the last close up picture and look at the bend of the stick. It almost looks like real skin. The branches with the buds are from our own huge tulip tree, I decided it was ok to take a few branches off to brighten up our house. Felt a bit guilty though, but I’m pretty sure the huge tree will survive and it gives us double pleasure – in the garden and on our dining table. And who knows they might grow roots and then I can make more tulip trees.

Garden ” Seeds

Did I tell you already? I am pretty sure I did, but let me tell again: We FINALLY have/rent a garden of more than 2000m2. This has been my dream forever. I can finally grow my own veggies and eat fruit from our own fruit trees. There are cherry trees, apple trees and a huge walnut tree in our garden. Besides these there are enough herb bushes all over the place. The veggies don’t grow by itself though, so it was time for me to start the seeding process. For now I took out my old seeds which have been dusting away in our drawers.

I had been saving egg boxes for this purpose. And I also still had a lot of plastic boxes left from NL from the take away “chinese”. Anyway enough to seed all the veggies. Next time I’ll seed the flowers, we first need to eat some more eggs. We need to do it quite quickly since the weather is changing drastically, so the sun is coming out more and more.

The next thing would be that we need to prep our veggie garden space, the former renters were planning to make a swimming pool, so they had put some plastic on the flat area and on top tons of sand. We took away the sand and plastic ourselves and are hoping that our gardner guy will come soon to place new soil on top of the empty area. That’s why we couldn’t seed some of the seeds directly in the garden – for some things (like the thing you see above ;)) it’s better to seed it directly. But will see, we can’t do it differently for now though we will first have to wait till the seeds come out.

To be continued…..

Garden ” The mystery of Bay Leaf

Birch cup by Mitsy from Artmind.etsy.com

I haven’t told you yet but the house we are renting now in France has a garden of a few thousand m2. Which is amazing – especially when the weather will get better in a few months. We have a few permanent fruit and nut trees in the garden, which I’m quite happy about. Again: can’t wait till summer begins. But we also have some herb bushes in proportions that I haven’t seen before in my life. We have rosemary, lavender, etc etc. We also have this 2x2m bush which seems to be Laurier (Bay Leaf). You know the leaf that you put in stoves?

Yesterday we pulled some leafs from the bush and started googling and found out that some types of “laurier” can’t be consumed. The discription says: if you think it’s the right one and it smells like the right one – then probably it’s the right one.

I was planning on sending these things to friends, since we have so much, but now I’m a bit hesitant – how do we know if this is the right herb? Anybody has a clue? Do you think this is the consumable herb? If you have experiences with these kind of things, please share them with us. Otherwise we will wait till our gardner comes next month and we will ask him if this is the edible one.

Garden ” Workshop eating wild plants

Today Eduard and I went for a little walk in the woods and we learned how to find and prepare wild flowers and plants. It was a great way to start our weekend. If you live in the Netherlands, you can contact “De Natuurkok” and join one of their walks.

Garden ” Almost ready