Sowing parsnips and carrots, plus other progress AND a frog!

It was real April weather today; one minute absolutely baking hot and the next pissing down rain.  This is probably THE most "april"ish I've ever experienced.

It did settle down into the early evening though so I was able to get out into the garden and do some planting and other things.

This is a long update so I'll get onto it now.

First of all, huge HUGE thanks to my parents for buying me a lovely mini greenhouse (another is on it's way I hope) which I assembled:

Isn't that a beautiful little greenhouse.

The chillis are finally showing so I've moved them into little planters and put them in the greenhouse

Beautiful apple blossom :) i'm SO excited by this!

A little frog that appeared hopping over the garden - it's the brown blur bottom right if you can't spot it ;)

There he is. Hopping across the prepared ground for the carrots. He made his way into the bushes at the back of the garden and disappeared. I love nature :)

The dividing line between the parsnips (left) and the carrots (right) is the two halves of my broken spade... awesome.

Here be PARSNIPS! Each stick is set to delineate a row of seeds

Your very proud host in the process of planting the carrots; here I am selecting a stick to use as a place marker for a row of seeds.

Bradato Kopele (that'd be me then) digging a trench for the seeds.

Sowing the seeds - I'm REALLY doing the splits here - it's a wide part of the bed!

Trench completed, here I'm picking up small pinches of seed to scatter

In this shot you can see the TINY seeds that I'm scattering.

Finally covering the seeds over with about 15mm of soil.

The finished bed with carrots closest and the parsnip in the distance.

Each row is about 15-20 cm apart and contains about 30 seeds across the length.


I have also planted some tomatoes into a propagator but there is NOTHING to show you so I'll not bore you with a picture of soil in small compartments.

There is still NOTHING from the potatoes - I'm checking every day.

Oh yes, and the other evening after work I managed to get 40 mins in the garden post work and did all the weeding around the herb garden, apple tree and the veg patches with onions, garlic and shallots. Everything appears to be growing very well. I am VERY excited.

A weekend of digging...

So I spent all Saturday digging, and started doing so on Sunday (until the weather tempted me too much to lay on the grass reading and relaxing....

But before my laziness took over, I managed to extend the vegetable patch half way across the back of the garden, and also started a couple of feet of patch on the right hand side to extend it back towards the house.

So a few pics coming up, starting with my new pride and joy, the light of my life:

My new All Steel Spade (buy one yourself here)

The All Steel Spade as I'm about to use it :)

This is how the bed looked after Friday evening's effort

And this is at the end of Saturday... that was HARD work!

The view of the garden on Sunday early morning (note the light frost.... oooh don't kill my veg nasty mr frost!)

And the view just now showing the extended bed to the left of the picture, and the tiny little start to the right hand bed. I will be planting potatoes and carrots in the left hand bed tomorrow after work.


So, this weekend I have really gone for it, proving the even for a Part Time Homesteader sometimes you DO need to put a lot of effort in for prep.

Growing Progress

My onions, shallots and garlic are growing really well :)

So, while I am dig dig digging for the rest of the vegetable patch this'll have to keep your avid interest in my garden at bay for another day or so.....

The Stuttgarter Giant Onions

The Karmen Onions

The Red Sun Shallots

The Casablanca Garlic

The Apple Tree budding... oooooh YEAHHH!!

Right, I'm going to go outside for another whole day of digging.  The new All Steel Spade is epic, but this is really hard work as I'm having to dig through turf and pull out a large amount of roots and glass and metal and plastic and whatever crap has been buried when the garden was laid.

Remembering the purpose of this blog, I think this is something to add to the lexicon of knowledge about Part Time Homesteading - if you have prepared ground then it's very easy to do this part time however, as soon as you need to do what I'm doing now you need to be able to dedicate hours and hours to digging and breaking ground in prep. The good news is that next year it won't be as hard to prepare for growing.