Author: Amanda

Amanda, the creator of Grounded Gardens, is a passionate gardener, mindfulness instructor, and family person who values sustainability and biodiversity. With a background in social work, she shares her love for gardening, mindfulness, and family life through her blog and social media channels. Living between Sweden and Austria, Amanda aims to inspire others to connect with nature, practice mindfulness, and embrace sustainable living as part of the Grounded Gardens community.

WeekNews #2 Feels like summer, almost

It’s starting to get really warm now and it feels amazing and a little stressful, lots to do! The lilac is blooming and the cuckoo has started to gala. That’s signs of early summer here!

The grass has really started to grow which is great since I’m using it to cover the open soil in the garden. I hope to cover most of the rows to save on water and keep weeds out. But I won’t use grass on all of them, we don’t have enough and also it’s not necessary. In some rows I will plant pumpkin that will cover the soil and for example with potatoes I don’t want to add anymore manure. Anyhow I started to cover my garlic and onion. I was so excited for my garlic this year. Last winter I planted a lot of it and hoped that we would be self sufficient from this fall on. Unfortunately a lot of it has rotten because of the very wet winter we had. Better luck next year I guess…

Gardening isn’t always beautiful. We continued with our pond and hopefully the ducks will arrive this week. Our super nice neighbour came to help us with the digging. It went great except for a little mishap with our raspberry. A long branch snapped, luckily we were able to take some cuttings from it so hopefully we will get a lot more raspberries in the future. It’s my second time taking cuttings from raspberry and what I do is I cut the green sprout just under a pair of leafs clean the stem from almost all the leafs and put it in moist soil. Then all you need to do is keep the soil moist and wait. I hope to build this pond without using a rubber mat and just use some sort of clay instead. I’m looking into how that works and will make a post about it if we decide to go that way.

Blue Christmas, the most beautiful chili

This chili makes me so happy! I just had to share its beauty! It’s called Blue Christmas and it starts with fantastic, beautiful small, small purple flowers that turn into purple fruits and the more the fruit ripens it shifts to red and when it is completely red it is ready to be harvested! It’s like the chistmas tree of chilis because fruits are in different stages and therefore in different colors at the same time.

I don’t know if it’s particularly resistant to lice. But we had other plants next to it that got lice and neither of our two plants of blue chistmas got it. I have heard that chili can be a bit sensitive to lice so maybe it’s a resistand kind or we just got lucky! Anyhow I’m very excited to try it when the fruits are completely ready!

WeekNews#1 – A weekend in the garden

This weekend has been all about the garden. We have a lot of plants that need new pots before going out in the garden in about 1-2 weeks.

I replanted my beans (broad beans, green beans and one called blauhilde), squash, pumpkin and watermelon. I also got some tomato plants from a friend of my family which I planted in our greenhouse. We have all our tomatoes in the greenhouse to reduce the risk of potato leaf mold. Apparently you’re not supposed to grow potatoes and tomatoes within like 500 meters from each other. Unfortunately we don’t have that opportunity. So if it becomes a problem we probably won’t grow potatoes anymore since we can buy locally produced from Öland.

I also got the carrot seeds in the ground. We grow two kinds, one for summer and one that is good to store for a longer time. It’s our first year growing carrots so it’s really exciting!

And last but not least I planted a row of sugar peas. It’s definitely one of my favorites. So sweet and crunchy!

No fence but the carrots are in the ground

While I was doing a lot of planting Affe had a friend over and they started to make a fence around the garden. Mostly it’s to keep our dog and cats away from the new planting. Although i doubt it will keep the cats away since they can climb over it very easily. I just hope it will be easier for them to do their business somewhere else and that they will choose that instead!

Rhubarb jam

The rhubarb season has begun! Yeay! It really is one of our favorites. My dad always made rhubarb jam when we were little, as soon as it was possible to harvest.

Here’s how we do it:
Harvest as much rhubarb as you can carry, or at least as much as the plant allows. Rinse and cut into pieces. Some peel rhubarb but I usually don’t, do what suits you! Boil the rhubarb pieces until they are soft and add sugar to your taste. Done!

It’s so simple and so good! We usually eat it as it is or have it in “fil” (google translate says sour milk but I don’t know if that’s the correct translation..), yogurt or porridge.