The School Garden

I tied up the cucumbers - 3 on one side are doing much better than the other side. Interesting. Straw from Jordi's dad's farm. These are padron - a small green pepper.  

Last year my own tomatoes out grew their supports and I ended up with a mishmash of cobbled together supports. I vowed this year would be different. I should have built the structures before planting but I have managed to get supports up. There's a square one and triangular ones and single sticks for the students to move and see which structure is more stable than the others.  I need a lesson in tying stakes together!   

There are weeds!!! I initially thought they were little lettuce leaves coming up as I'd liberally sprinkled seeds everywhere but no! It's a very fast growing ground cover succulent. It had to go. But then the earth would be bare. What to do? The grass had just been cut and had dried over a few days so I placed that around the plants. So exciting - the potato from the supermarket started growing! Our watermelon, le'ts see if it grows or not.  Another issue - something is coming along and digging up the strips of cloth, which are also disintegrating as well. It's so hot and dry. I think it's the neighbour's cat is looking for a drink.  

Here are all the different watering systems we started with. This is lengths of rope through a hole in the bottle, the end weighted down with nails. I half buried the bottle to keep it in place. I ran the rope just under the ground around each seedling.  Update: this system is working really well with the ropes constantly damp. Next time, I'd put the ropes straight down into the ground so the roots get the water. This one is stips of cloth which isn't working so well because each strip gets dry. I covered a similar one with a larger bottle lid and cut out areas where the strips run.  This one works on evaporation. Inside is an upturned half bottle filled with water. The water evaporates inside and runs down the sides. This isn't working that well as there isn't really enough water being evaporated. We changed it slightly and put a cut water bottle covered in black tape. It's better but still only surface water.  This one is a plastic bottle buried upright with holes...

Towards the end of May I was ready. Armed with all my plants, clothes, rope, water bottles and boundless enthusiam, I started putting things in the ground. I planted in circles, each set of plants around a water source. It took ages and by the end, it felt like I hadn't even dented the space! I hit clay not too far down so the clay pots sit a little high. I found some rope in a local shop to use as an alternative wicking system coming directly out of the water bottle and burried in the ground, wrapped around the bottom of each seedling.   

I was keen to put plants together that like each other and flowers that assist nature's balance of insects and bugs. Marigolds detract bugs from plants, tomatoes and beans like growing together and tomatoes and peppers don't. Potatoes need to be far from tomatoes. Nasturtiums can go anywhere and also are good for repelling bugs. Lettuce is good for ground cover. I made a map of what would work together, what are friends and foes. I wanted a mixture of companions and foes together to see what would happen. It was turning into a complex puzzle of experiments! My page was filled and I imagined a busy and full space, just like I'd seen around town. I started to lay out the plants and got digging. There still seemed to be so much space 😬

I started reading about self-watering systems and narrowed down my multitude of options to a few main contenders. One of the main criteria was to use natural or recycled materials to get water to the plants.  Thanks to neighbours, Ian and Sarah, I got a painters cloth that I cut up into strips and raided Jim's stash of nails to weigh down the strips in our used water bottles. This one works on the wicking system but this particular system didn't work well. The strips of cloth dried out before they could get the water to the plants. Too much evaporation and wind. I wondered about using a plastic bottle with the strips coming out of a hole in the sides.  This system is also a wicking system and worked much better. In fact too well on the smaller seedlings that were permanently wet. The bees and wasps also like drinking from this one as they have something to land on. Still a bit of evaporation from the top though. Another neighbour, John, started researching and found the Olla s...

 How it all began... I started a container garden in our new place in Taradell, Catalunya last summer (2021) and I had no idea I would love it so much. It grounded me during the pandemic, consoled me during my language struggles and soothed my anxiety about venturing out of the safety of our house.  I grew tomatoes from seedlings, strange I know as I don't even like tomatoes but I loved seeing them develop more leaves, a flower and a tiny tomato! I watched them grow, and grow, and grow into a forest of tomato plants. It was so joyous.  I'd had a dream to grow tomatoes and chillis to make peri-peri sauce which I eventually did 😊 Fast forward a year and I started dreaming of having a garden made of earth rather than containers. Jim talked about finding me an allotment ('hort' in Catalan), something very common here. Everyone with a piece of land grows an abundance of vegetables in the summer.  Soon the town grapevine was activated. My walk and talk friend, Raqel, hear...