My First Spring! Learning to grow all the things 🌱

After a dry winter, early spring was marked by weeks of torrential rain here on the east coast of Spain. The riverbeds which had been dry since the previous summer sprung back to life filling with frog and toad spawn overnight. Our normal walking routes were cut off by torrents of water in places I'd never seen it before and for weeks we battled to keep working in the rain in a constant cycle of getting drenched and then drying out again by the fire. And then one day it stopped. There was one final storm and the next day it was like summer had arrived. Whereas before it had been a battle to get anything to germinate when it was supposed to. I haven't had much luck with tomato germination in seed trays probably because it's been so cold and I don't have a proper greenhouse. Now suddenly the challenge was to keep young things alive in the scorching heat which was really more like the heat we'd be expecting at the height of summer. With the rain and then the heat everything was bursting with life. The trees, the greenhouse, the garden, rivers, ponds and water deposits. I spent so long just watching, observing the changes as they happened. I just sat here for like 20 seconds and I saw in that time a frog sitting on a lily pad, a dragonfly laying its eggs and I discovered in amongst these pond lilies loads of baby fish. In so many ways spring really has felt like a miracle. I'll never get over how quickly plants can just shoot up when conditions are right, growing visibly between sunrise and sunset. After the long dormant winter it seemed like everything was changing in the garden from just one day to the next. Plants that I thought had died magically came back to life and plants that seemed to be doing well just a week or so ago suddenly decided that the heat was too much for them, immediately bolted and set seed. I'm trying to let at least one of each plant I'm growing set seed and produce seeds because saving your own seeds year after year not only saves you a little bit of money but it also means that little by little you end up with plants that are more adapted and acclimatised to your specific conditions. It felt like we were slowly starting to feel the abundance that I knew this land had in store for us. At the beginning of the year I started a challenge to eat something from the garden every single day. At first I was padding out the days eating things like mint, oranges which we had in abundance, picking little sprigs of herbs here and there. Well now the challenge was managing to eat or preserve everything that was coming out of the garden. We took out the last of the winter crops to make room for the spring crops. We ate what we could, we gave away, fermented, pickled or froze the rest. So I want to show you the garden as it is now on the 29th of May. The garden has three main sections. There's the bit that we call the top garden which is the nicely pathed part of the garden which is a mix of all sorts of different things. There's no planning in any of these beds so I'll show you these in a minute. And then there's what we're calling the self-sufficiency garden which is the main area of beds that I've been developing this spring. This is where most of our stuff is growing and it's our learning garden really. It's stuff that we like to eat, it's stuff that I wanted to try growing for fun and for learning. And then just over the other side from there is what we're calling the extra bit of garden which is a couple of extra beds which I had to plant because I needed more space and these beds were prepared from last year. In all of these beds we've just got a mix of all sorts of things really. This is a bit of a three sisters bed with two sisters which I think I showed you earlier. Some chard and some broccoli left over from the winter. We've got a broad bean plant which I'm leaving to collect the seeds from so that's just tied up there in the corner. A couple of amaranth plants down here. I told you it's a complete mix. On the other side a few garlic, a wigwam of sugar snap peas, we've got mint and a cabbage. A bit further along we've got two kale which still haven't gone to seed surprisingly. I guess they're in a bit of a cool spot here so I'm still harvesting from these which is great. This little plant in here is a medicinal plant called ruda. I think it's called rue in English. You can make teas with it and it's really nice. Some broad beans which I think I probably planted too late. They look a bit straggly, they're not doing all that well or maybe the soil wasn't great here. I'm not sure what will become of them. Then further down here lettuce. These are meter beans. These are the beans that produce really really long seed pods, bean pods, hence the name meter beans. Some cucumber, a few tomato plants here. There's tomatoes dotted all over the place actually and an old brussel sprout plant that has very much gone to seed. I really love this section of the garden. Ideally all of the garden would be like this with wood chip paths and flowing organic shaped beds and plenty of trees planted as well for that sort of food forest type system. Everything seems to be growing really well under and around the trees and having the shade in summer is such a bonus. It's really allowing us to grow things like kale and brassicas that often bolt in the heat and lettuces as well. They're doing really well under these trees. It was a lot of work to develop this area and the mature trees were here already so that was a bonus which is why in the other part of the garden, as you'll see in a second, everything is just laid out more conventionally in rows and beds which was easier to kind of put in place but it has its downsides as I'll explain. So this top garden extends around. We've got a wormery with a few pumpkin planted in front of it, our compost piles and we've extended it around so that it joins up with the what we call the self-sufficiency garden. Got an amazing lemon verbena here which has just sprung into life literally in the last two or three weeks. I think I'll cut some of this and dry it soon. Another brussel sprout hanging on for life here partially shaded by the lemon verbena and beyond we've got a lemon tree which I'll just pass underneath if I can get past this enormous brussel sprout. Along this side we've got more peas. Some of these are ready to pick. Lots of rose bushes which are lovely. They were here from before from the previous owner and this is our first attempt at a bit of a hugelkultur bed just to see how the technique works for us here. It wasn't particularly deep. We dug maybe a foot down and filled it with rotten logs and twigs and stuff like that. Plenty of compost. Filled it back up again with yeah compost and the soil that we dug out and we've planted it with we've got some beans here. This variety is Kos Violette purple climbing bean. It is purple and it is climbing. This is all valerian which I don't remember now why I have grown so much valerian. I've actually planted valerian in quite a lot of places and I cannot remember whether it was for the leaves or the flowers or what so I need to double check that. A little row of sunflowers. More valerian and a squash. I think this is a Mallorca squash and behind me we have the self-sufficiency garden which is the rows of beds, three rows of beds that are planted with all sorts of spring things and quite a few winter things left over as well. This field has lots of citrus trees in it. We've got an orange here, we've got a tangerine, another tangerine and just over here another orange tree. They've all been pretty productive over the last couple of years that we've seen them apart from this one which last year, well this year didn't give any fruit really at all so we'll see if it's on its two-year cycle and it does better this year. It has got blossom but I don't know to me it just looks a little bit sickly like the leaves are much paler, more of a lime green than the other orange trees and tangerines which have a much darker tone in their leaves so I'm wondering if there is something potentially not quite right with this one. One thing that I think I'm definitely not doing right is the way I'm using the space underneath these trees. As you can see it's mostly just overgrown, I've more or less left it to grow whatever wants to grow there and I think what I should be doing is using the space under these trees, making the most of the shade that they provide and trying to grow underneath them using them as like a guild, growing beneficial companion plants that are going to do well in these conditions. I don't know exactly what I would grow, I'd have to research that and look into it but I think really that's what I should have been aiming for with these little sections rather than leaving them as like wild islands, actually use them for growing something valuable. I did plant spring bulbs underneath them when I mulched under here in the winter and that was really nice but now those spring bulbs have gone and it's just mostly just grasses under here, bindweed so. This field also has a lot of grapevines in it which are looking pretty amazing right now. So this first couple of beds we've mostly got things like cabbages, broccoli, chards that's still going from the winter and I just can't seem to get through enough of it to actually consume what's growing here so it's still there. This bed's a bit of nothing really, it's got some calendula in it, some artichoke and a few bits of lettuce that I have picked and are coming back again so I think maybe I could do something else with this bed. Got another tiny bed there with some kale in it. This bed here I've recently replanted, we've got some autumn leek and further down we've got some edible chrysanthemum, some sunflowers and oh we have got some spinach planted in the middle but I think it's a little too hot for spinach now so I'm not expecting much from that. Oh and some basil. In this next bed we've got alfalfa and we've got some cucumber and some corn and again some spinach in the middle which is starting to bolt so I will pick this soon. In this bed my strange pea which has palatability issues. Well I've been cooking and eating these and trying to see what those palatability issues might be. As far as I can tell it's just a perfectly normal edible pea. This bed here has recently been replanted with some sweet peas at the end, some basil and tomatoes. Apart from that it's got some radish which has gone to seed. I'm leaving this to collect the seed so that I can grow more of the same variety next year. At the back is black radish and this paler coloured radish is daikon. In my previous video I was pickling some of these little seed pods, well these seed pods I'm leaving them to actually dry out but yeah they are also very nice and tasty and edible. Garlic. I think I've got about 130 garlic plants planted in various places. I haven't just got this bed. I wish I'd planted more though because what you can do is you can eat it when it's at this stage. You can harvest it early and here it's called ajo tierno which is like soft garlic. It's delicious. You can use it to give the garlicky flavour that you would get from a bulb but I think it's just slightly less potent and yeah I really like this use of garlic so I wish I'd grown twice as much so that I could harvest half of it at this stage. And my remaining bed of broad beans. I wish I'd planted twice as many broad beans and I also kind of wish that I had not bothered overwintering them. These were planted in the end of January I think whereas another set I planted in October November and they've basically caught up with each other now. I'm harvesting these ones just a couple of weeks later than I harvested the ones that had been overwintering the whole time so honestly I think that was just a waste of bed space which I could have been using for other things all through the winter. I don't know that's just my inclination from having done it once this year so maybe there's other benefits to overwintering them. I don't know maybe you get stronger plants in the end but yeah that's just my observation. And then the second row of beds which I've got behind me are constructed the same way as the others. They're just bordered with tiles instead of rocks. Again they're no dig beds so aerating the soil, a layer of compost, a layer of cardboard and then a layer of straw. In these beds I've got things like beans, lots of runner beans. I've got a couple of beds of potatoes, I've got chard, carrots and beetroot. We've got some more peas in here as well, some squashes and in amongst them other random things like sunflowers, herbs and other kinds of flowers just to mix things up, attract pollinators, have some colour and some diversity in these beds. And then the final row behind me is a row that I'm doing slightly differently. Instead of the cardboard and the straw I'm just using black plastic as a weed suppressant. So in this case I aerated the soil to start with, layered on a layer of compost and then just put the black plastic straight on top. I did that after it had been raining really heavily so the ground was pretty wet and actually it looks like all the grass and stuff has died and decomposed quite well. There's a lot of worm life under here so in that sense I'm glad, I'm happy but it's also just really ugly. So I don't know, I sort of did this because I thought it would be the quickest way to open up a few extra beds but I'm not sure about whether to really extend this row any further with this method. Also because I am slightly too far away from the water deposit to water comfortably with the hose here so I don't want to be growing more stuff in this row really and I am still watering with the hose. So yeah I guess if these beds do get full I'll rethink things but for now I'm not going to extend any more. So these are beds where I've been sowing a green manure tester crop. It's a mixture of oats and vetch. A few other things I'll show on the screen and yeah I just did two test beds of it here. I wanted to see how quickly it grew, what kind of density to sow at and I want to see obviously as well how it works as a green manure when I dig it into the ground. The oats are just starting to set seed and the vetch is flowering so I want to cut it down before those seeds mature so that I don't have the seeds in the ground for next time when I plant into this bed. I could alternatively in another area use this seed mix to establish a permanent green manure slash cover crop depending on what I wanted to do. So like around some of our olive trees and other terraces I was thinking I might use this same mix to establish a permanent ground cover there but in this case it was really just to sow it, let it grow and then cut it down and turn it into the soil. Well the cover crop has definitely kept the ground moist under here. This is super wet and I don't water this bed because it's supposed to be for drylands this green manure so I have not watered this. I don't think I've watered it at all. Just a bit of extra stuff that never made its way to the compost pile. I guess this is composting in place. So I was just cutting down the green manure in this bed and I've just tipped some of the actual goat and chicken manure onto here as well. It's not completely finished so what I was planning to do is just cover it with cardboard and leave this manure to decompose a bit under the cardboard and see how long that would take and what it would be like in a few months and I've just noticed I don't know if they were in the cover crop that I just slashed down but there's loads and loads of little green bugs. I think they're aphids, little caterpillars, wormy type things and I just thought this would be a great chance to put the chick on here and see if he or she enjoys eating up all these little bugs. So here we go. Here you go, do your thing. There we go, look it's a feast. Oh he loves it. No stop going that way. That's right, delicious. That's it. So that wasn't quite the introduction I was planning to give you to our chick but yes we do have a chick now. One of our 11 eggs hatched and none of the others did so he or she is all on its own so that's a bit sad but yes we have a chick and I will soon get some more to join it. We've also got some other animals as well. You may have been able to hear them in the background of this video. If you have and you've got any ideas let me know or if you follow us on Instagram you probably already know. In the next video I'll tell you all about what's going on with the animals and the things that we've got planned there. Thank you for watching this one. I hope you have a really good week. I think I'm just going to do one more thing today before calling it a day and that is harvest some of our weird unpalatable peas. Tofu. Tofu. What I was planning to do is just leave it. Oh stop it. Tofu. Don't lick your lips like that. What are you doing up here? Okay I don't think he's quite understood the mission. Here you go. Do your thing. Nope.