Yesterday we had the first salad including lettuce, rucola, onion, garlic, beetroot, parsley and chives from the garden (and eggs!).
The apples, pears, peach and apricot have now flowered, the fig tree is making figs, and our new quince tree and the (ornamental) cherry are currently in blossom.
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| Everything about quinces is amazing, the leaves are soft and silky, the blossoms soo pretty, and the fruit mmm |
I have fought a continuous battle from the trenches with the snails. After the miniature agroforestry idea with garlic plants didn't quite work out, I smeared and sprayed pure garlic and infused garlic water over my seedlings. This deterred the snails 1 night. Then I put plastic cups around the plants, smeared with vaseline and more garlic. This worked only against the larger snails. We bought an anti-snail slime ("safe for children and pets") and snail traps. The slime disappeared after 2 nights, the traps collected less snails in 2 weeks than I did on my nightly collections.
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| Various plastic cups and a snail trap. |
So after a week of all those ideas and products, I resigned to going out every night after dark with a torch, a bowl and a spoon, and collected all snails from the rucola, lettuce, artichoke, beans and beetroot. For a long time the only result was that the plants remained barely static, being just able to regrow some of what the snails ate. The chickens learned to appreciate a daily dose of snails for breakfast. Most lettuces and rucola not in plastic cups decreased in biomass. But finally the temperatures or sunshine hours must have gotten over some threshold, and everything started growing despite still having snail attacks every night. And suddenly there was enough to harvest!
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| This is in fact rogue lettuce that grew from self-seeding plants last year. interestingly, the snails don't eat this lettuce so much as the newly planted seedlings. |
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| We don't have asparagus (yet) in our garden, and recently found out that barbequed asparagus is delicious |
We also planted some more native plants in the garden, notably this tree fern:
