I’ve been posting a garden diary on instagram the last 3 years since I started adaptation gardening after reading Joseph’s book and finding Julias course.
I’m sure most people here are way to cool to be on instagram, so i’ll use this space to post my year 4 garden updates🌱
The 2024 harvest from 750 squaremeters
I’m most proud of finally getting a good tomato harvest! Hope to be able to replicate it again this year, despite already being a month behind sowing them.
This was also the year where I learned to dehydrate the excess and realised how useful dried aubergines, molokhia spinach and bottle gourds are, when making lazy stews👌🏻
2024 Garden Harvest
With a little help from claude ai, I finally got my 2024 harvest summary ready.
And I’m really happy! I’ve become a much more efficient gardener since I started in 2022.
One reason for the much bigger yield in 2024, is that I added more new land as the first plot is already planted with trees and perennials - from 300 square meters to 750 square meters in total.
The other reason is a combination of 3 years of adapting my own seeds to my soil and gardening style (thank you @goingtoseed1 for the Adaptation Gardening course) and simply growing more of what naturally grows well.
Some of the harvest have been given away directly in the field, and never made it to the scale. I could have harvested more if I went to the garden more frequently, but in the end we have gotten more than we can eat with just 3 gardening days a month.
All the papayas and fresh salad leaves we have eaten in 2024 are from the homegarden, and not part of this calculation.
2024 (12 months)
2023 (12 months)
2022 (8 months)
Tomorrow I’ll post the harvest breakdown. Guess which crop produced the most?
*** more than can fit the bike, so 2025 has to be the year I finally take that driving license😅 It would also save me 9 hours a month on bike transport to the garden.
February 7th 2025:
Garden diary day 203 and 204 - finally back in the garden😍
I planted a row of @skillcult apple seedlings interplanted with multiplier onions, a sweet acorn tree from @balanotrees, a row of mixed colours turnips, potatoes and 40 meters of mixed fava beans from @stephane_rave
Garden harvest:
3kg sweet potatoes
200g fava greens
200g wild chrysanthemom greens
200g green onions
30g wild calendula
2kg broccoli shoots
150g buddha’s hand citrus x kumquat fruit
300g cauliflower
500g yacon
100g jerusalem artichoke
Lots of seeds including 4 cobs of bug free, mold free grain corn for the first time ever! Thank you for the seeds @Richard
February 14th
Garden diary day 205/206
Post full moon potatoes and roots planting🥔 The farmer next door told me he sees a 20% increase in yield when planting the day after a full moon, and with my potato luck I need all the cosmic help i can get😅
So I got 6 rows planted with a rainbow of potatoes plus a tray of potato seeds grown by @stephane_rave . The seedlings were tiny, so I planted them in one of the large compost bags with composted horse manure, protected from the snails. These are special and deserve a little kindergarden while they grow up.
I mulched the potato rows with cut weeds of wild calendua, marie thistle, grass and chrysanthemums.
This is one of the best times for wild greens in the garden - hybrids of wild and domesticated chard pop up everywhere, some with really cool colours or enormous leaves. I should start collecting seeds of the best ones, but I love the fact they come up reliably without any work on my end - besides leaving the garden a bit weedy.
Wild Chrysanthemums grow every where and @mywildgreens taught me to eat them! The snails leave them alone, so it’s easy to harvest clean “spinach” in large quantities.
While not wild, fava bean tops make a great tender spinach substitute with a lovely mild flavour.
I keep finding beautiful rows of garlic that I apparently didn’t harvest last year, so we should get an abundance of scapes this spring plus clusters of smaller garlic for winter. Which is lucky, as the fava beans have invaded the garlic cloves I planted in October.
Besides potatoes, I planted some black and yellow turnips, radishes, beets and parsnips. It’s my first time growing parsnips, so curious to see how they’ll do here. Maybe they would prefer an autumn planting, we’ll see.
I also planted another grafted sweet acorn, and took scionwood from several apple and pear trees to share with friends and make some more fruit trees.
Next week I’ll be planting out grexes of shallots, storage onions, sweet summer onions and leeks, before all the summer vegetable planting begin in march.
Garden harvest:
1.5kg of broccoli shoots
5kg sweet potatoes
200g kumquat-like citrus fruit
February 22nd
Garden diary day 207 - welcome to allium alley! 30 meters of diverse perennial alliums with apples to the left and avocados on the right. Today I planted oerprei perennial leek and Hairy friend perennial leek which both form cloves like a garlic, so you can keep harvesting the largest leeks in the clump and the smaller will have space to bulk up. Both of them set viable seeds too.
I also planted lofthouse multiplier onions and 3 strains of shallots. Waiting at home to size up is 5 other types of wild leeks from joran’s seeds and research, Ed’s red shallot, @ShaneS’ tulbaghia hybrids and blue shallots which in reality is allium fistolosum, scallions, Mallorcan sweet red onions and pearl onions.
My goal with this row, is not needing to have to plant onions again, or at least very little just to refresh the patch. I plan to leave the best in the ground to multiply and save seeds (hopefully get some fun crosses too), and harvest the smaller ones or ones with less desirable traits for the kitchen.
In between the onions, I planted some @skillcult seedling apples to give them an irrigated nursery row until I find their permanent location. As well as seedlings of a diverse lettuce grex created by @stephane_rave
Besides onions, I got some red and yellow gojiberries and an autumn olive (eleagnus umbellata) in the ground that was taking too much space in the home garden, 2 rooted mulberry cuttings and a rhubarb.
Garden harvest:
5kg spring onions (from onions forgotten in the ground last year, now multiplied into lots of thick stalked spring onions)
2kg yacon
5kg broccoli shoots
3kg canna hybrids from @ShaneS
1kg cardoon
50g mixed mint
50g wild fennel shoots
100g kumquats
100g wild beet leaves
We just got a shared chest freezer with my parents in law, who live next door, so I’ve been having fun blanching and freezing the excess broccoli shoots, so we can enjoy homegrown broccoli throughout the year. Now I wonder why it took us so long to get a freezer!
YES! I’m so happy that we get to see you growing here. I hope it will still get you some useful and fun interactions.
If you want to have some more outward-facing social networking, I have some suggestions if you interested (Every person leaving Meta these days gets a medal in my mind).
Tak Malte! Sure, what ideas do you have? I was thinking of substack.
I got some new colour variations in the pumpkins this year, I guess they got tired of their pastel look.
None of the original pumpkins had these blue, terracota and black streaks
The closest thing to Instagram that is gaining a lot of traction these days is Pixelfed - an image-based network that connects with other platforms so you’re not closed into one corporate ecosystem. Pixelfed is also working to establish itself as a non-profit, which is the gold standard for reliable tech today in my mind.
For long-format and regular updates on-topic, I think a Discourse-forum like ours is actually the best solution. You can reference it from wherever you are on the web and it pulls people into a community. I wish our forum could federate with other social networks like NodeBB does. Then you could basically blog from this forum and be connected to the world.
If you’re looking for a blog or newsletter like substack, I would recommend Ghost. They’re not part of the federated social web yet, but they’re working on it.
Ssso lovely :-)))
I was gonna save seeds of these colourful pumpkins for you:)
Thanks so much!
Sssso great 
!!! As a true cucurbit lover that’s a treat
Thank you for sharing. I deleted my instagram account (@schliesing_house) last month, on inauguration day. Your garden updates were among the few things I enjoyed seeing there.
Aww thanks😍 Well done for deleting it! I haven’t been as brave as you yet.
I think you were the one to recommend I grow skirret, right? Well now I have pot of seedlings ready to plant out.
Yes. I hope your seedlings grow well for you. We’ve grown skirret for several years. It will self seed, but I don’t think it will spread much. I haven’t tried cutting off the flowers/seeds to see if that yields larger roots.
Great results Tanja! Beauty and efficiency combined. You’re a 1hybridswarmfactory for the Mediterranean.
What species are those? Kinda looks like moschata, but very unique. There aren’t really clear indicators that would tell 100%.
They are moschatas - result of 3 years of crossing lofthouse moschata grex, green fleshed ayote, seminole and musk de provence. Maybe a few others that I planted first year but don’t remember the varieties.
