What a success this growing the plants and creating the food from the home garden has been actually! Sure, not everything that has started in the ground ended up as the biggest party. But some of the seeds have done really well and turned out to be super low maintenance. Put them in the ground, make sure they have enough water, maybe remove a bit of the snails that really like being there. And boom…with some sunlight there they are good to go after a couple of weeks.
As you might have read in an earlier post from me I have never turned out to be the gardening guru with all the knowledge. All of this knowledge comes from a free app called ‘de makkelijke moestuin’ or in English (the easy allotment), which literally gives tips and tricks what to do with the plants. It also checks what the results have been and with that it gives you new steps to do based on what you already have there.
Here you can see where I am now and how the planning is. By the end of June the paksoi will be finished and it will be time to put something new in there.
I had been flirting with the idea of more homegrown veggies from the garden for a while now, but the idea never really took off. One of the things it surely has something to do with it is the lack of knowledge that I had. Because….where to start? How many seeds to put in? In what season? How long should they stay inside before it all goes outside?
Not really helpful, and it sure as hell doesn’t make it any more attractive to start.
There were two things that really triggered me to actually start. One of them is that a friend of mine recommended the app to me who also has zero skills. And the other thing that also triggered were the prices of veggies in the supermarket for literally nothing special.
For just a simple paksoi you would be paying like 1.39 at the moment. Well try making a dish with that.Paksoi is like spinach and it shrinks really fast so you need some decent amounts from it to actually make a meal from it.
The same with cucumbers. At the moment you would be paying more than 1.20 per cucumber (I’m sorry…in my brain these guys are just always 50 cents max) and that doesn’t make it that attractive. The bad thing about the cucumbers. Well that plant didn’t survive the road from inside to outside, it aint all a success in the end right?
What also was a big success was the growing of arugula salad. That stuff just wants to grow and expand until you cannot eat it fast enough anymore. Literally every sandwich and every salad has been covered in arugula and still the plants are huge. Now flowers are starting to come in there so that means the end is starting to come near of them.
But these paksois are awesome indeed. According to the app you cut them off above ground so they can grow some new leaves again and we will see what happens then over the next week or two. And the food that came from it? Well, an awesome dish from the wok with some tomatoes, nuts and some homemade wok sauce with ginger, oyster sauce, sesame sauce, soya. That wasn’t too shabby at all actually.
If this is home growing stuff at home turns out to be like this every time. Heck…then we are good!
