Summer has finally reached North-East Germany. The neighbors have shifted from complaining about rain to complaining about heat. With the summer garden looking great, I turned my attention to winter greens–while trying not to think about winter. I also dug up some potatoes and mulched some more.

Note: The video version of this post gets released on Wednesday, August 14, 2024.

In late July, I made more soil blocks to pot on all our winter greens. A lot of them had germinated. I also moved them out of the mini grow tent and onto the balcony. First, in the shade, then slowly into full sun.

Pepper and I spent a lot of time in the garden. He diligently checked the carrot bed every day. No carrots yet, little guy. I drove to the local feed barn for some bales of last year’s straw. Bad feed but great mulch.

I struggled to pull the bales up to the garden house. Yes, it would have been easier to split it into more trips. Our living pathways are far from even. But it works.

In a few trips, I got them all into the garden house.

There was–and is–straw all over the floor and ground. Once they were out, I’d clean that up. The bales are heavy and hard to grab. Finding the strings is a challenge.

The feed barn is only open in the early mornings, so bringing them in was all I did before heading home.

I got some work done and took a proper break–occupied by my favorite dog–before heading back that afternoon.

And then I moved the first bales back to the growing plot. Good thing I have a proper cart. The first straw went to the tomatoes to keep the branches off the ground. Everything to prevent blight, right?

I didn’t yet know I’d be crying while chopping them down only a few days later. But it didn’t matter. Mulch is almost always the right choice. I am sure this did not make things worse.

And with living pathways and imperfect bed edges, the straw helped keep the weeds manageable. Keeping the ground covered is one of the basic principles in this garden. Bare soil is bad soil, as I keep saying.

In this case, the straw also helps keep moisture down on top of the soil while keeping moisture in below.

Supposedly, slugs are also not a fan of the material. I don’t think it makes a difference. I’ve seen them on straw.

We have a lot of Spanish slugs (Spanische Wegschnecke, Arion vulgaris) in the garden. It’s been a wet year. I’ve also found a few leopard slugs. I love to see those. They only eat decaying greens, so they like many snails are clean-up crew.

Plus, they eat the eggs of Spanish slugs, so they reduce the numbers of the unwanted little slimeys. Leopard slugs are friends. No matter how much they look like the slugs they are.

If you have time, you should also look at how they mate. It’s really fascinating. I’ll link a video below. But this isn’t a David Attenborough documentary (sadly), so let’s return to the task at hand.

I added the last of the straw bale to the carrot bed while Pepper made sure no one stole any by sitting on them.

The second half of the tomato bed still didn’t have a proper edge, so I set up the umbrella and got to work. The old boards were all left behind by the people who abandoned my forest plot. We use what we have here.

For those who are new here: this is more-or-less a rented plot. I’ll give it back in about 18 months. We will then move onto our own land somewhere in Southern Europe, so investing in proper bed edges makes no sense.

Instead, I dig in boards and accept that they will rot away over time. We have quite a few rhizomatous greens in this garden: horsetail and at least two kinds of grass. The edges help a little to keep things in check. I still have to manually pull out a lot of weeds.

Things still move a little more slowly than they used to. My injured finger is healing but very slowly. I default to my left hand for a lot of tasks at the moment. It will be months before the hand heals. Or so I assume. My doctor’s appointment isn’t until September…

It is so hard to see the tomatoes this healthy all over this footage. This is three days before I had to cull them. I can hardly believe that there was no blight yet then but three days later, the plants were almost dead.

Luckily, we were also a week or so away from the rain stopping for good–a much needed dry period.

Two days later, I learned about flying-ant day. Many ants swarm once a year. The virgin females fly out to have a quickie before starting a new colony.

In general, the last days of July were a whirlwind. And an emotional roller coaster.

I canned the rest of the potatoes my husband had harvested to preserve them without tough skins. I thought I’d harvest all the other beds over the following days, so I tried to make room.

We eat a lot of potatoes. Having these on hand is makes life easier.

And then the emotional roller coaster began… First, a few turns to emotional turmoil:

“My neighbors lost all of his animals. They all had to go because some nimby decided that he didn’t want them in the area. So I just watched as my favorite sheep and my favorite goats got loaded up into a trailer. And I’m in a really shitty mood and I don’t like it at all. So later we’re going to head to the garden and try and save as much of the tomatoes as possible and see what else needs doing. It really needs to stop raining.”

“Those are my tomatoes. I just chopped down almost all of my tomatoes. And I don’t know if what’s left is going to be able to recover because we’ve got light in there.”

But things did get better.

“I’m not having a very good day but my husband’s managed to cheer me up a bit and I’m gonna be harvesting the potatoes. I’m at least harvesting most of them, maybe all of them will see but I just drove in here, and it’s so tough to not be greeted by animals on that side because usually all of them would run up the fence. I’m gonna miss those things. Ah they were so cute but the last of them got picked up this morning. It was really tough but I’m in better spirits now. The husband’s managed to get that done and um I’m well enough mentally that I can dig up some potatoes. Wish me luck that it’s not all muck and rot and that they will actually be harvest.”

I finally found some good news! I’ve grown a cucumber. It is a cucumber!

I started with the earliest potatoes still in beds. The first potato was just perfect–and gave me hope. Maybe, just maybe, these Irish beds were doing their job, and the potatoes were doing fine? Maybe.

I harvested the first plants, and the story was the same: dry, perfectly intact tubers with no sign of blight. But I’d canned all the potatoes at home, so I decided to keep digging anyway.

Because of how I’d dug these beds, the ground hadn’t been loosened here. It’s why potatoes are great bed starters. They compete well with weeds. They can deal with soil that isn’t perfect. And they cover the ground well.

And when you go to dig them up, you find all the weed roots.

Hold on, Pepper wants attention.

“Hi Pepper!”
“Was denn? (= “What’s up?). Hi.

The Irish beds have some added advantages: the soil is raised, so water runs off better.

But the ditches collect water for the deeper roots to tap into. But the best thing for me: they turn lawn into pretty decent garden beds.

Look at the soil. It looks very different from the mess of roots, grass, and weeds we started with. Speaking of things that look good: the potatoes were in great shape. No sign of blight on any of them. The yellow volunteer that had come up in between was also without any sign of browning.

It looked like I’d decapitated–I mean topped–them just in time. The plants definitely had blight in them.

As the potatoes were doing fine in the soil, I let myself get sidetracked by the back ditch covered in weeds. It was in a bad state. I hadn’t left a path on that side, so everything was growing in.

With only a third of a bed harvested, I called it a day.

“The camera with the tripod is dead, and this one currently doesn’t have a tripod. So I’m just gonna show you one, just so you can see how it works, and then I’m gonna get this done and get out of here.”

These were our latest potatoes. They were also in best shape but there were clear signs of blight on many of them. After the tomato disaster and all garden neighbors losing their potatoes to blight, I was paranoid.

I chopped them all off near the base to prevent any of the blight going down to the tubers–and weeded everything.

“Hi Pepper! Ready to go home? Let’s go home. Come on.”

“I think I haven’t touched anything. Let’s finally go home.”

Thank you so much for watching to the very end and making it through this grumpy episode that I did today. So long and thanks for being here. If you want to support the channel and help me keep making videos with everything that’s going on, please consider donating.

Anything you can do helps, but if you need the money as much as I do, please don’t let that be you. Okay. Anyway, thanks for being here.