Tuesday 3 February 2015

Gardening Diary


I try to keep gardening diary, but fail often miserably. I do manage to write down the first spring sowings and have made a plan last autumn how I want to plant this year's garden. I do practice crop rotation, so it is important to make a note of the planting, because it is oh so easy to forget where the different plants were. Above is my diary in its new jacket. I ended with IKEA waterproof cloth, as I know that I will handle this book with dirty hands, which is in clear evidence in the picture below.

It looked like this to start with


One of those white jobs bought as a lot of five. I chose not to glue the cover this time, but made pocket ends.



I thought that the pocket outside could hold a pencil and a seed packet or such. Ehm...that seam looks awful! I just could not be bothered to do it again as it is purely decoration, the binding. Sometimes I just let be as is and that's ok as well.

I am not a real green thumbed gardener as I have not perused all the seed catalogues as yet...I will soon though and I will consult both my box of seeds and the notes of what I have planned to plant. I try to get something new to try for each year, although the newness might be just another variety of a vegetable or flower I am already familiar with. A certain new thing I want to grow this year is a cucamelon.

Do you have gardening plans as yet? Will you try something new?

3 comments:

Julie said...

Hi Johanna,

I'm not the gardener in our family. But my husband spent a good part of the weekend ordering from catalogs. Our allotment isn't perennial and our weather prohibits us from planting until late May. I think he has to be out of the garden by mid-October.

I showed him the pictures of your allotment on your blog and he's fascinated by what is done there. We can't have structures as such on ours so it's really quite different.

Have fun planning yours.

Mama Elf said...

Yes, it is very British thing, the permanent allotment. I might write a bit about it, as many of my friends who read are not in the country. Is yours a piece of a field, so to speak, which you cultivate for the summer? I think they have those in Finland and Denmark. There might be sheds and such to put your tools in, but not always. This one is mine as long as I pay the yearly rent and mine is by no means the most built up one. I think I might go out one of these days and take pictures of the allotments.
Did your husband find anything exciting and new in those catalogues?

Julie said...

Johanna,

Ours is run by a volunteer community garden association and the land is made available to them by the government entity that owns our greenbelt (which circles the city and then some). We pay a tiny fee yearly ($50 cdn or so) which is to cover water and tilling and such. Our plot is 800 sq ft. They do make a small number of plots available on a permanent basis and they are fun to see, with fruit trees and asparagus and things we can't grow. I don't think my husband ordered anything too exciting. What I love the most are beets and tomatoes. I canned a lot of salsa last summer. :) I hope you post some new pictures; I'd love to see them and I'm sure my husband would too.