After a storm

Yesterday, we had the worst storms since quite a few years. Frankly, it was scary to look out of the window and see lightnings every few seconds, trees bending to the ground, and people fighting with umbrellas and eventually giving up and seeking shelters. My only worry at that moment was our garden. We put so much time and effort in maintaining it and now it was all at risk.

As usually we went to the garden early in the morning, and as expected we could see a lot of damage. Most of our tunnels were broken and plants were laying on the ground. Luckily, after a closer look we realized that most of the damage could be somehow repaired, so we started to work.

Once we finished I took some photos, so that I can show you an update after a couple of weeks. When I compare these photos to the ones from my last posts I can see a lot of progress which makes me happy.

Let's start!

Our quince tree has a rust problem which we didn't manage to attend to yet, but luckily it's not spreading quickly, so our fruits are happily growing.

There were a couple of neighbours looking at damage in their gardens and they complimented my potatoes when they came to talk to us.

They look so healthy! They are flowering already and up until now we didn't have any potato beetles! Potatoes in surrounding gardens are heavily damaged by these insects, so I'm sure that eventually they will spread to our plants too because they can fly, but I'm checking them every day, so I don't expect huge damage anyway.

It was such a beautiful morning and somehow surreal to think that there were storms almost all night.

I'm so proud of my peas! I found a package of old microgreens peas at home and planted it. I had no idea what will come out of it as the package was 5 years old. I was surprised to see that almost each seed sprouted and now they are growing so well. They are only up to the knees and stopped growing but they bear lots of flowers and plenty of baby peas already. We might harvest some of them tomorrow for our stir fry lunch.

I was worried about my pickling cucumbers as many of baby cucumbers turned yellow. I was not sure if it was the lack of pollination or calcium, but it turned out that they were probably just too young to bear them. Now, there are many small green cucumbers, and we have already harvested a few of them. To be honest, there are still a few yellowing ones, but I guess that we just have to accept that.

Those plants are growing like crazy. I cannot keep up with attaching the branches to our supporting construction 🙂

Zucchini is so good this year! I only planted them 3 weeks ago and we already harvested 3 of them and this is our 4th. It's going in our couscous salad today.

Unfortunately, one zucchini plant broke last night, but we planted enough, so should be fine. I almost cried when I saw it though.

There are many flowers at the moment, but they are all male, so I can't wait for more female ones to come out.

Celery is also going strong. I have it covered in a tunnel that was destroyed last night, but luckily all plants survived. We have already built a new tunnel and hope that this one will last.

I have separated some beetroot seedlings last week, but it was so hot that they all burned during the day. The soil was wet, but the leaves somehow didn't cope well with too much sun. Those that I didn't transplant are still growing well though. It's too late to replant the seeds now, so I might just get some seedlings in a shop and plant them.

Corn is already up to my knees, and I don't understand how it can grow so fast, but I love it!

Those dry stalks behind the corn are our garlics. They are almost ready to harvest, so they don't look very fresh anymore. And I also don't know what kind of garlic it is as the former owners planted them in autumn and couldn't tell us. We left it there to see if we get something or not. Hopefully, something is happening under ground..

Our chili was getting tall, so we removed the fabric from the tunnel last week. Due to the storm 6 of them fell over and we found them on the ground in the morning. Luckily, they were not broken, so we attached them with a string to the construction. This is only a work in progress and we will come up with another solution on Saturday when we have more time to spend in the garden.

They already have flower buds, so we don't want to lose them!

Shallots and red onions are pretty too. We have picked some greens to eat and they had a strong yummy flavour.

Most of our carrots greens were on the ground. We cleaned them and they went up again. I was expecting much more damage here.

Tomatoes are a bit slower than on the balcony, but they are flowering too! We need to wait a bit longer for those juicy tomatoes though 🙂

The peppers that I planted a few weeks ago were so fragile, so we protected them all with tunnels. It worked very well until last night. Today, we found 2 plants broken in half, so we couldn't do anything. Luckily, I planted 130 plants, so hopefully there will still be enough 🙂 No more storms!

I was excited to see them growing and getting deep green colour.

I can only say that we eat salad every day and it still looks like this. So grateful!

The former owners were telling us that there is soooooo much mint growing in one part of our garden. This scared me as I know that mint is spreading quickly and can take over the entire garden, but until now we didn't see any mint. I thought that it somehow died off as all our neighbours had large plants already. Now, we can finally see baby mints coming! And they smell good!

My tangerine sage looks lush! It's one of the most delicious herbs that I know, so I'm happy when it is happy.

And even our African basil started to grow when I was already losing my hope. It always looked so sad and almost dying and look how pretty it is now! It probably just didn't handle such high temperatures.

We're harvesting raspberries every day and they keep coming - free breakfast! 🙂

Grapes are growing too. When I checked them 2 weeks ago they were less than half of the size of what they are now.

And now to the flowers...

I had no idea that there can be various colours of flowers on one hydrangea plant. They are beautiful!

I wanted to take some of them home, but then I decided that they are probably happier where they are.

I don't know the name of this flower, but I'm happy that I didn't take them out in spring as they are pretty. I left all the plants from the previous owners in the garden this year to see what comes out and if I will keep it for next year. I think that this one can stay 🙂

There are also so many roses. The bush is now bended because of the storm, but we will adjust it in a couple of days. I will have to prune it drastically in autumn as it's growing out of proportion and taking over too much space.

I have found a couple of slugs close to the plants, so I took them and placed them in a container, so that I can move them to the forest. I put the container on the table where I also placed 3 pickling cucumbers that I wanted to put in a salad for lunch. The cucumbers were about half a meter away from the container. I went to take photos which took me about 10 minutes. I came back and one of the slugs was already eating the cucumber! Can you see the damage on the right one?

In such a short time it managed to go through such distance and eat so much! People saying that slugs and snails are slow probably haven't seen one in action yet 🙂

It must be a very delicious cucumber as the slug seemed to enjoy it a lot. I have removed it before I took the photo, but I found it sitting on the cucumber and moving its mouth in a very high speed.