My garden in June 2019

June is in it's final throes and it's time for my monthly garden update.
Thanks to @simplymike and her #gardenjournal for inspiring and motivating me to write and share those posts about my gardening experience.
It makes something I love even more joyful.

Expectation:

Luckily I'm on a short vacation and got plenty time to hopefully - for the first time ever - get my post ready before @simplymike 's contest ends.
Sitting in the sun with a cold beer and writing a steemit article. The dream!

Reality:

I spent three days on playing gaimz, drinking beer, eating, hiking and some flunkyball with the family. Not very productive.
In the end I'm running out of time again and so does the sun...

Let's see what's been going on in the garden since May said goodbye.

The peach tree, as far as I remember never actually produced any fruit. From what I've heard there's no real chance of growing peaches in our moderate, mid-european climate without the use of pesticides. Once infected by the curly disease, the cold and rainy spring provides perfect conditions for a neverending yearly outburst that keeps the tree from gaining enough strength to develop a healthy harvest, or sometimes to survive at all. Without the use of pesticides there is no chance of stopping that torment unless you can manage to keep the leafs dry during the crucial time between January and March when the fungus does it's devastating work. Technically that means building a roof over your tree.
No freaking way.
This year I got the timing right and nearly exterminated the fungus, so finally the tree is crowded with little peaches that are actually growing. To be fair a lot of the small ones are falling off, but I should have removed most of them anyways, as neither the branches will be able to support the increasing weight in case we let every fruit grow to full size, nor do we want the tree to put that much energy into one harvest and rather let it gain some strength for the next year.

Overall the peach seemed to be doing very well until I noticed another threat hiding under the leaves...
Aphids!

Most young leaves are covered in so many lice, I was surprised they still look perfectly healthy. As I'm not using pesticides on growing fruits, there's no way of stopping this infestation and all I'm left with is the hope that some ladybugs will find the banquet and go ham on the suckers.

I think that's one? Go ladybug, go!

Oh, and the tree did actually produce at least one peach. I can't find another explaination for this random baby peach growing in the garden...
In a pot you go!

Awww yeaah - baby asparagus everywhere!

Initially I expected the asparagus plants to be 100% male as they produce higher yields and some seed manufacturers don't want you to propagate them yourself. Therefore I was a bit surprised when I first saw random asparagus plants growing between the pavement stones last year. Back then it was only one or two plants, but this year - holy smokes - the stuff is growing everywhere! Guess I could start a farm...

Fertilizer N°1

This year I learned once more how important fertilizer is. I usually shy away from using anything on my plants but water and some compost, but this year I noticed again how much of an impact fertilizing has.
My chili plants were far behind from those of my brother until I gave 'em some of that blue stuff from the chem lab. I knOW…not very cool to use but we still got that big bucket that's been hiding in our basement for years...

To be fair, it works like a charm. In just two weeks the plants went from this:

To this:

And one more week later we're at this:

What I'd much rather use is compost, though.
It's a bit of work flipping the whole pile every few weeks but it's free and it's natural - and it attracts all kinds of fishfood for my aquaponics.

One of the piles was ready, so I used it on the asparagus which is mulched and in recovery mode right now, and spread the remainder throughout the garden.

By the way, my compost is 100% cat approved.
Neighbour's cat sleeping on the compost pile, in the rain:

The beby birbs

June is also the time when all the baby birds leave their nest and start following their parents, watching them and learning which foods are 'ok' or 'nono'. Or maybe they just lazy. lol
Aside from a pair of sparrows, once again we had no birds nesting in our garden this year, but I started leaving some mealworms on a table when I saw the great tits building a nest.
The great tits - ROFL - vanished before they laid any eggs but the mealworms did not go unnoticed. A pair of redstarts found the protein snack and regularly dropped by to see if I left them some.
On June 1st the whole family invaded our garden and we could watch mommy bird hunting around for insects and the kiddos sitting around, waiting for their snacks.

But who comes up with those names - seriously?!?

Aquaponics

After an initial yellowing of the leafes, that I suspected to be a nutrients defficiancy, the system is doing kinda ok now. Although the growth rate is still pretty poor compared to my soil based garden. Further observations and much feeding of the fish is indicated.
One problem that I encountered is the excessive loss of water that occurs from time to time. One reason was leakage at the intake but most seems to be from overflowing due to a missbalance between in- and outlet, resulting in loss of nutrients and therefore the growth issues.
While generally beeing very time efficient, a daily visual inspection is still mandatory.

That lettuce is not looking very healthy…

The annoying part of gardening

All gardeners know how annoying weeds are. It becomes even more apparent when you set up an aquaponic system and all of a sudden there's no more need for weeding or watering.
While most weeds are just annoying but otherwise can be easily dealt with, this is the stuff nightmares are made of - Bindweed.

Their rhizomes hide up to 2 meters under ground and in between other plant's roots. No matter how much you try to dig them out, some pieces remain and new vines will shoot out in a glimpse, climbing relentlessly and choking your beloved plants to death.

I hate them.

The berries

I must confess I'm not a big fan of currant. All of our trees were originally planted by my brother. As far as I remember we used to have red-, black- and yellowcurrant, gooseberry and their hybrid the jostaberry.
Lately the redcurrant was always a bit hesitant at sprouting but still brought a rich harvest. This year it took longer than usual and I think it's finally save to say that there won't be no more red berries...RIP

After the yellowcurrant tragically passed away last summer, this is the second one that died. The dry summer takes it's toll, I guess.

The gooseberry - the only one I actually like - is always crowded with berries but it seems to have some sort of illness as most of the berries shrivel and fall off. Maybe another fungus?

More garden fun

The snow peas that I cultivated for the past years were not very satisfying. This year I got a new variety and it turns out that the pods are absolutely perfect.
There's one major issue though...

There's only one plant and that's all I could harvest.

Despite sowing three times already, I don't have enough plants to harvest a decent amount. Let's see if the new ones that I boiled and soaked in water for a couple days are willing to perform better.

Sadly there's more fails this month.

I guess the Kohlrabi from under the coldframe didn't like the rain and half of them literally exploded.

Interestingly though, the white ones that were not under a coldframe are perfectly fine - although not quite as big.

Good thing I have some mealworms to feed and they love kohlrabi. They are almost like chickens when it comes to kitchen scraps.

Talking small harvests - this is what the sweet potatoe looks like after the winter. Let's see how big it's going to grow this summer.

Time for a break

Right now we are about to face the hottest days of the year and I will have to hide inside while I'm busy doing non-garden work. I will make sure to continue my documentary on my gardening and keep you updated. But now it's time for me to enjoy an iced coffee while this bee is nibbling on my finger.

Cheers!

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