They say gardening is wonderful and every time I publish a gardening blog with photos of what we have in the garden, I get a lot of nice comments, people envying me in a good way, for having the possibility to grow fruits and veggies. Indeed, it is nice to grow your own food and healthy too, if you do it right. However, gardening has a side that is never shown, or not many speak of.
Last weekend was harvest time for the raspberries, gooseberries and currants. These fruits ripe pretty much the same time and need your attention when it's time. There's no postponing, procrastinating as otherwise you can kiss the harvest goodbye. So I spent all weekend harvesting, cleaning, washing and cooking the fruits. Would have been nice to have some rest, but there was no time for such luxury. Now we have 64 jars of jam (currant and gooseberry mix). The raspberries are frozen at the moment as the process of ripe is long, so we're collecting every day or every other day what is ripe and keeping it in the freezer, to be processed at a later time.
After the fruit harvest was finished, I had to attend the vine. This cheeky creature is growing like crazy and doesn't have any intention to stop.
To understand what I want to show you here, let me tell you a little bit about how you take care of the vine. Every spring you need to decide which fruit branch you want to keep and which has to go. The vine, like any other plant is growing in every direction, but that doesn't mean it benefits your purpose. So keeping those that will be bearing fruits is important, the rest can go. Then after flowering, when the grapes start to appear, another trimming is in order. Don't ask me why, but I was taught to keel two nods (this is definitely not the technical term for it, but have no clue what it is called) and then cut the rest. I call nods those parts, where you see the leaves growing. Cutting the rest after the bunch of grapes is necessary. If you keep the branches growing, you get a jungle and instead of feeding the grapes with important nutrients, you feed leaves and branches.
Here you can see, the branch was cut once, at the beginning of spring, but mother nature is sneaky, the new branch is growing already. No matter how cute these leaves are, they need to go.
There's a trick I use to find these new shoots. Maybe it's not clearly visible on the photo, but these new shoots are very light green, a nice color by the way, but there's a contrast, compared to the old leaves, so it's easy to find them.
Here you can see that branch is growing and it's not needed at all. These new shoots will never have fruits.
This is what I call jungle 馃榿. You can't really see what's there, apart from a bunch of leaves.
Sometimes the situation gets out of hand and branches grow like crazy.
So that's something you have to do all season as mother nature never stops. You get rid of one and the other is growing already. For me this is a lot of fun, although sometimes I could use that time to do something else, but the work needs to be done.
If you look at this photo, this is not a jungle anymore, the grapes are visible to you and they are visible to the sun rays too, which is the main idea. The more sunlight they get, the faster they grow and ripe. This is why, at the end of September, when the growing period is over, I trim the leaves to give them more sunlight. This is something I have learnt from watching an Italian channel and I'm really proud of it as it helps a lot. It took me some time to convince my dad as he's old school and not really keen of accepting change, but he has seen the benefits, so he's ok with it now.
This is the end goal. This is what you want to grow, not leaves. Again, I'm not an expert, not even a connoisseur in this regard, but what we do makes sense and have results.
This is from last year, a type of grapes that is similar to muscat, very sweet and nice flavor, but needs sunlight to ripe.
Another job that is not spectacular, nor fun is cleaning. Yes, sometimes cleaning is needed. What you see on the photo might look like a mess, but it's the onion flower, that was already dry at the time of the photo. This is an ornamental flower, we have these just for fun, so the yard to look good.
This is how the flower looks like, I just haven't been able to figure out how the coloring works 馃槀. Yeah, illiterate, I admit. So I don't know if it's green first, then it turns purple. Most likely, but I'm never there to witness the whole process.
So I had to cut those dry part off, but the good thing in this was that the whole thing went into the compost bin and it's getting recycled. I love composting as it has a number of benefits.
So yeah, those who think gardening is all about harvesting lovely tomatoes, cucumbers, cherries and strawberries, it's not just. There are a lot of works that need to be done and the list never ends :)
If you're a newbie, you may want to check out these guides:
