Planting out the veg garden, Roses flowering, fruit bushes...

 Its another gap in posts, not another 10 year one but longer than I wanted!

     This week I have been planting out the tomato plants in the Hugelkultur raised bed, With working on the house I didn`t plant tomato seeds I bought small plants from the market, some plants for yellow tomatoes and some plants for red tomatoes, no idea on variety some type of cherry tomato I think,  every variety of red one had signs with the names on , but these I asked for a week or so ago and the woman brought them in for me as she has no yellow usually.

I soaked the plants for a few minutes in water to check the roots had enough water.

     

Then planted out in the HugelKulture raised bed, next to one of my sage plants

This week all the roses are starting to flower, at last the Bulgarian oil rose is flowering , it has taken about 3 years from taking the cuttings to flower. but has many flowers ready to open.

I set up a jar to extract the oil to make rosewater

Many other roses are starting to flower

Lots of roses here but only just starting to flower, at last count over 50 varieties! I have planted in the garden but then again I am just near Kazanlak in a main rose growing area so I should have lots of them being the rose valley, there are 2 massive rose oil distilleries in different directions just 5 minutes from the house and many fields of oil roses around.

Most things are growing quite well, I have white currents getting quite large, all the other currents are growing fine as well, gooseberries growing , pomegranate trees with flower buds about to flower all over.

And.....Being one of those months for finding passwords, i have been trawling through old hard drives and found at last my old password for another youtube account, found some old videos of some industrial machines such as printing presses, videos about using glues and some more dogs this time crazy collie dogs!

Hugelkultur Kitchen Garden raised bed no water, 1 year on, a great success for self sufficiency no need to water in a drought!

Hugelkultur , the best way i have found to grow food in low water areas

I have always liked researching and trying different ways of growing things and I have planned to try this for about 15 years, so in 2023 I decided it was time to have a go due to the water table dropping so quickly and lack of rain here in Bulgaria.

Dogs think Hugelkultur is great as well and join in with the digging and sleep right in the way, Rufus loves all dug soil..

This is a traditional method of growing dating back hundreds or more years in Eastern Europe, and Germany but was first made popular in a German book in 1962 by Herman Andrä  the term means hill or mound growing, more exactly ,the beds are mounded up with old wood and things like that inside to allow low water use due to worm activity bringing water upwards

 I had a pile of semi rotted firewood of a few types Oak, Acacia, Beach wood I had chopped from plums and cherry, branches from years of pruning roses fruit trees blackberries etc

First I picked an area that nothing grows, a large plum tree sucks the water from the ground here,

I dug a trench about 750mm deep and filled with layers of wood then smaller sticks and leaves and green weeds from the garden to fill the gaps, a layer of soil , then more wood and weeds , every few layers i added a watering can of water sprinkled over it to help it start rotting

I kept piling it up until the trench was filled and mounded up about 300mm above ground level making it about a meter deep in the center of the mounded trench bed.

After a week or two , I planted s few pot grown tomato plants and cucumber plants in it. at the center of the mound, i only planed a few as it needed testing , and it takes a year or so for the ecosystem within to start working correctly 

Once the plants were in the bed I watered for the first week with about 100ml per couple of days to allow the roots to spread as they established themselves

After about 2 weeks the plants had no water and I had massive crops of tomatoes from them , other tomatoes planted near by with nothing but flat standard soil, needed watering every day to prevent wilting , the Hugelkultur bed needed no watering all year and had a bigger crop per plant.

Last year (2023) we had almost no rain from April until December so it was a good test for growing in arid conditions, 

This year I am building more areas of Hugelkultur as it worked so well.

And a video of  Lucy the Wolf Dog....