Two days after I’d abandoned the mushroom beds in a bad mood, my husband joined me in the garden to help. He flew the drone while I did some weeding, and then we got to work. Three mushroom beds, more ripe white currants, and a potato harvest were waiting.

Note: The video version of this post gets released on Wednesday, July 24, 2024.

He started the digging. I finished it. Soon, three holes were done.

I’d thought the currant bush was done for the season but he’d seen loads of berries. While the drone was set to follow me around, he harvested, and I shoveled.

We’d miscommunicated about where the soil from the hole should go, so I shoveled it around a bit. I had plans for this soil on a new bed soon. I’ll try out a different method for growing potatoes here soon.

The straw I’d soaked went into the first hole, while I removed the last horsetail from the others.

We’d grown mushrooms in buckets on the balcony the previous year. Now, we wanted to try mushroom beds. Hopefully, there would be boletes in this bed soon.

The other two beds are for two varieties of oyster mushrooms. We had good success with those last time.

We followed the instructions from the seller, but both of us are sceptical this will work.

One thing we noticed was how different the spawn of the three kinds of mushrooms looked.

The final bucket with lemon oyster mushrooms was filled to the rim with a white sponge of mycelium.

There was almost no food let in the bucket. Looked like we’d seeded them just in time.

I covered up the beds while my husband dug up the first potatoes from our beds. When the beds were done, I found him doing some much-needed trimming, so I cleaned up our tools.

With a presentation at a climate-change conference and an exam under my belt, I returned to the garden.

Before a heavy rain storm, I’d spread the donated grass and the hay we’d cut ourselves around the tomato bed.

Unfortunately, the rain never stopped long enough for this to dry. Weeds grew over both the grass and the path. I decided to add it all to the compost pile and start over on the path–and finally finish the edges on this bed.

I tried to use the fork to roll the pile to the compost but a lot of it was still attached.

So, I pulled some more. It was the most satisfying feeling to feel the weeds give when I pulled.

A few rolls, then more pulling. I was slowly moving toward the compost area.

This pile was full of things I did not want regrowing, so it went into the compost bin with our food scraps.

Hold on, let me turn down the sound, so you don’t have to listen to plane noises. Okay, better. We are nowhere near an airport but we’ve been getting a lot of military air traffic in the area.

Anyway… I will let the compost sit and hot compost for a while.

Once the path was clear around the beds, I moved new freshly dried grass clippings to a pile.

My friend and I had mulched half of the bed, but the other half needed a lot of work–and a lot of mulch. Luckily, my neighbors seem to like mowing lawns.

The tomatoes were a jungle. Almost all needed some love. The hazelnut trees are worth their weight in, well, wood.

I had not planned to do any trimming of the tomatoes at all. But the endless rain is a real issue. Most of my garden neighbors were struggling with mold issues. Many had lost tomatoes and potatoes to blight.

I am not scared of tomato plants falling. Usually, I’d leave them down on the ground. But there is too much water.

I’ll give the tomatoes some help. Some trellising, some removal of lower leaves and suckers for better airflow…

Getting these off the ground feels like the best thing to do. But who am I to give advice? This is my first year here.

I am especially excited about these plants. They were grown from seeds I fermented and saved myself.

I reused more parts of the old porch swing to make a strong trellis for the Zuckertraube. I hope these are as sweet as the fruit I took the seed from. They were deliciously sweet grape tomatoes.

There was so much work left to do on the tomatoes. I’d barely made a dent the day before.

My husband had seen that the beans needed trellising, so I hammered in some stakes.

I’ll add support for these soon. For now, they don’t need to carry much weight.

I have a few ideas how to support the stakes. For now, this will do just fine. There were plenty of stakes all over the forest plot. I’d get around to it.

The constant rain has cut into our garden time severely. Everything is wet and muddy a lot.

I’ve been told time and again that this was a bad year to start a garden. In a way, they are right.

A lot of things have failed. A lot of things didn’t work out. And a lot of it was out of my control.

Sure, an easy garden year would have made a nice start. I definitely learned more with everything going wrong. If I can grow in these conditions, I can figure it out elsewhere, too.

A lot of “failures” were also mine to bear. These carrots could have been planted a lot easier. I wasn’t ready.

But look at the little things. So many seeds sprouted and are off to a good start.

Where I can, I use the weird weeding tool I don’t even know he name of.

Between the carrots, I used my fingers to pull the grass and weeds. I won’t be able to sew carrots for much longer, so I am babying these.

Like so many parts of the garden, these would get mulched soon. I guess my neighbors don’t like mowing enough after all. I had again run out of grass clippings. But I had secured another source, so more would come soon.

The grass I had went around the corn. Bare soil is bad soil. I’d get the carrots mulched soon, too.

As always, I went by: first weeded, first mulched, and the corn had been weeded days earlier.

A few days earlier, Pepper had not felt well, and my husband had taken him out at 4.30 am. The sun was just rising.

After taking care of Pepper, he rushed back for the drone, and captured the sunrise over the fields. With PJ pants, he was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.

This stunning footage makes it all worth it. It did not fit the story anywhere, but I had to share. Enjoy 🙂

So long, and thanks for being here!