missjekyllslife
live.create.enjoy
Project “Köksträdgård”
It’s almost fall. Time to recap our first year as “farm owners”.
We moved here in December. Anxiously anticipating spring…and spring came and with it a lot of work.
We have a huge garden, but half of it was just a big meadow where the previous owner had the horses.
Already in winter we marked an area close to the house where the köksträdgård was supposed to come to life. “What the heck is a köksträdgård” you might think. 🙂 That is swedish for kitchen garden. Simply a garden where you grow vegetables, fruits and herbs that you can consume.
The first piece was the herb spiral I built out of bricks we found in the bushes. I always wanted to make one of these and now it is the center piece of our vegetable garden.
I filled the whole spiral with soil and planted herbs according to their needs. Or let’s say, according to what google says. 🙂
Going from there everything just fell into place bit by bit.
We planned to keep it as low-budget as we could, using materials we already had. Since the ground is very dense out here (many years of horses tramping on it) we went mainly for raised beds instead of digging plant beds in the ground. Bottom layer is cardboard, topped up with branches and half rotten wood and then filled up with good compost soil mixed with planting soil from the garden center.
Hard to imagine that this would be a flourishing garden in summer. It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed every minute of it.
Some plants we precultivated in the house. Rookie-mistake: We started way too early with that which caused, that in March and April we shared our living room with a lot of plants.
Will do better next year. 🙂
Considering that this was our first year as gardeners, we didn’t expect too much. But now in September I can say, we did good!
We grew a lot of delicious food ourselves. Not the amount that would make us self-sufficient, but enough to give us some fantastic home-grown meals.
Things we successfully grew this year:
- Kale
- Broccoli
- Cabbage
- Brussels sprouts
- Squash
- Leak
- Carrots
- Corn
- Beans
- Sugar Snaps
- Potatoes
- Marigold
- Tomatoes
- Chili
- Bell pepper
- Strawberries
- Raspberries
- Blueberries
- Big variety of herbs
- Spinach
- Pak Choi
- and more…
We learned a lot this year and have quite a few things that we want to improve next year. Already excited for next spring.
But this year is not over yet. We still go strong, having daily small harvests. Pure bliss!
missjekyllslife 
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