Kitchen Garden, step one!

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Here, close to the Spanish boarder, we estimate that the weather is roughly two months warmer than the weather in Denmark and the UK. That makes it early March to us; the perfect time to start preparing the garden! It is not quite spring yet, we do not know if more frost will come, and it's most likely, so we don't start planting seeds in the open yet.

First sunday in the garden!

We started by rolling up an underlaying plastic from last year, a type of plastic mulch, and tried to get as many of the weeds captured inside the roll as possible, to avoid weed seeds to spill out into the new garden.

As we rolled off the plastic, we found some nice treasures; mice holes, eggs of yet unindentified animal (perhaps spider or lizard?) and weed bulbs.

I took a few shots of the remaining plants from last year (broccoli leaf and grass. Get a good glimpse of the raindrops there on the grass, it'll be long before it's this wet again!).

Next we cut the last weeds and grass using the tractor. We then rotavated (smashed/turned) the area we want to use as kitchen garden space, using a rotavator on the tractor ('little' helper ;).

And I cut back an old Elderberry, to allow more light into the garden.

I have never planned a kitchen garden before! But just being in the garden, planning & planting the crops and vegetables for this year, is a meditational practice in itself ;)

We have made a rough sketch on how we would like the layout in the garden to be. And we have made a list of things we want to grow!