Doing Lots of Planning

Now that most of the gardening areas have working beds, I now have the space to add experimental crops.  

My plan to increase the crops of vegetables we eat on a regular basis, increasing the yield from each garden bed, as well as adding experimental crops, which will mostly be vegetables that we don’t eat regularly.

What I’ll do is buy a new-to-us vegetable from the shop and prepare a meal, and if they like it, we will then start planting it. If they don’t like it, we move on to another vegetable.

As for the plan itself, I’ve registered on Cozi, and included gardening activities in my master schedule, which also includes my writing, housekeeping and social schedules.

I also developed a gardening schedule, which has a To Do List for each day of the week.  This will hopefully make finding time to garden easier, as the hours are now allocated and regular tasks have been set.

I will have to tweak the schedule as I use it. For now it’s based on what I want, rather than what I can realistically achieve. But it’s a good place to start. 

Preparing for the next planting session

•           We’ve prepared some beds where we’ll transplant our tomato seedlings
•           We’ve finally started a compost heap. I took one of the old water tanks and cut it into half. We make the compost in one of the halves and use the second half to put plastic for recycling.
•            We’re also planting more tomato seeds. Last year we had a bumper crop. Unfortunately this year we’re struggling. Part of the problem is that we haven’t had much rain.

Making friends

One of my gardening friends in the village brought me a lot of chili seedlings. He’s an older gentleman (around 83 maybe?). We met earlier this year when he was driving past my house and saw my vegetable garden. 

Turned out he knew my father years ago, so he stopped and introduced himself, and we got chatting. Since then we share seedlings and our harvests every month or so. I gave him mint plantings the last time he was here, as he enjoyed my mint iced tea.

I also made a new friend – a woman I used to know when I was teenager came to buy spinach. She’s apparently anemic and birds decimated her entire garden. So she came over to buy spinach in bulk, so she could prepare and freeze it for easy consumption.  She also needs beetroot. So I decided to donate some of our beetroot seedlings. I look forward to getting to know her all over again- and sharing my seedlings and harvests with her.

Seeking sponsorship

I’ve decided to seek sponsorship for this blog.  I think the blog could develop into a valuable local resource, but I need help to do it, as my own resource (equipment, time and money) is limited. I know to that to be able to attract sponsors, this blog will have to be well-presented and to have compelling content.  That, I can do.

Anyhoo, wish me luck?