As you can see in previous posts, my old couch was shabby. I’ve monitored Blocked (ie the Swedish Craigslist) for an old-fashioned pull-out sofa. The full-length varieties can be had by the dozen, but this one is a dapper single bed. Except we will use it as a double bed. And my husband is tall… … Very tall. How we end up making this bed will most likely be a serial…
Thursday night I was at a lecture with potager aficionado Anette Nilsson of Boäng. Her king-size garden and vegetables blew me away. She attributed a lot of her success to horse manure, and reminded me of a technique I’ve come across before: “The Double Dig”.
Dig a ditch the depth of your shovel in your bed. Move the remaining soil to the far end of the bed. Fill with approx 10-15 cm of (properly aged) horse manure. Widen your ditch, but this time put the excess soil on top of the manure. Continue to the end of the bed.
Sadly today’s soil temperature is a humbling 0°C, but a girl can dream, can’t she?
Double Dig Notes
Last season I learned about both tomatoes and sowing. The reason seed compost, or even cacti soil, is recommended for seedlings, as opposed to regular soil, is that the meagre conditions are good for the root development.
Tomatoes seem to be an exception though; last week they were all shifting into an unhealthy purple nuance. I replanted two in a roomier pot full of juicer soil and gave the other ones a spoonful each of “the good stuff”. They perked up over night. When you repot tomato seedlings, bury the stem all the way up to the first set of leaves. New roots will sprout along the buried stem.
If you compare to February 9th, when the plants where a week old, they are no longer in newspaper pots. I find the newspaper pots really, really attractive, but I’m starting to suspect something is not quite right with newspaper pot microclimate; seedlings look stunted after a few weeks. My theory is that the roots reach the newspaper and are thwarted by fungi.
Tomatoes at 5 weeks.
I post all these colorful shots about stuff that I buy, but why deny all the not so glamorous work on the plot? Today I was busy tidying and cutting dead stems. I also investigated the status of my strawberry patch and snipped away a few offshoots. When I was about to carry them off to the compost, it occurred to me that they had sturdy roots and that some time in the future I might want a larger strawberry patch. I decided to put them back in the soil an see if I can get something out of them eventually.
The Temporary Strawberry Nursery
Much to my surprise, when cutting back the Lady’s mantle I found a large egg. I haven’t seen any geese or hens around so I was quite confused. The egg seemed to have been laying there for a while, since the color wasn’t exactly crisp. Could this be the work of Easter Bunny?
I have a thing for anemones. Unfortunately I’m most drawn to white ones with centers the color of charcoal. I also appreciate a very light romantic pink and bright red. The Swedish market is full of purple bulbs, and the odd crazy multi-color mix with lots of fuscia. At the garden fair today I bought two bags of white ones with white centers (“The Bride”). I also managed to buy twenty red bulbs, presumably called “Holiday”
I picked up a useful gadget too: a soil thermometer! Using seed tape I sowed a meter or so of winter sallad (Valerianella locusta “Cambrai“), and discovered that, while one side of the bed was moist and easy to work with, the other side was still frozen solid…
As for my crocuses, I can report that the more common species that I expect to be purple rather than blue, are the first to break trough the soil.
Les mots 
