Planting underway!

Amazing progress now!

I mixed together all of the stuff that I had. It was not quite enough to fill both boxes and I bought a bit extra which was still not enough but will have to do for this year.

The picture shows the two empty boxes, and half of the ingredients: 80l of Pindstrup Plus, 84l of sveppamassi sterkur; Hekla pumice (two sorts, 24l of coarse and 60l of medium).

The coarse pumice was not as suitable I think, so I mixed that in near the bottom. Here is a picture of the medium pumice, with a spade for scale.


I had been thinking of using wood for the dividing lines - still think that will be smartest but as a cheap solution for this year I used plastic coated washing line, tied to screws. Not so pretty but very fast :-)

After I had done all of that it took no time at all to plant/sow things! For the seeds and the onions sets all I had to do was push in my finger to make a hole. The potatoes I planted by digging down almost to the bottom, placing the potatoes, and filling in. Piece of cake!

In the deep box I planted:
3 squares of some French potato, funny shaped salad-type
1 square of Icelandic red potato
3 squares of parsnips (javelin)
3 squares of carrots (Nantes 2)
3 squares of carrots (Amsterdam 3 sprint)

In the shallow box I planted:
4 squares of onions
1 square of spring onion (North Holland Blood Red)
3 squares of strawberry plants

I watered the boxes a little feeling sure it was going to rain anyhow!




Finally, I covered both boxes with agricultural fleece.
The filling and planting was spread over two days. It is drizzly today so it is great that I got the work done while it was dry. I plan to sow a box of mixed salad leaves when I get the chance. I have the bean plants indoors still, really did sow them way too early so not sure if I should resow, or even try sticking beans straight in the boxes since I have left overs and nothing to lose.

Two down....

Huge help from Elvar today. We cleared the mint patch and the strawberry plants out of the garden and levelled it roughly.

With a bit of trouble we managed to get two boxes screwed together and aligned one on top of the other. We fastened them together with two wooden strips inside the box, on opposite sides. Think that should hold it together quite well.

The plan is to finish the third box tomorrow and put them in the garden ready to fill.

We (well, Elvar) drilled guide holes for three screws in each plank, put the screws all in place, then took two planks and screwed them together. I used a tile (30 x 60 cm) to make sure that the angle was 90°. Then we added a third plank, then the fourth. The first box had one side too long so we had to saw off the excess. The second box we checked the lengths before we started and it came out fine. The third box will have one side too long as well so we will have to trim it.

I meant to take a photo of the garden before we started but I forgot. Need to take some tomorrow.

Got the timber!

Well that was interesting!
I thought I would buy the timber for my boxes at Húsasmiðjan but found out that the timber section has moved out to the suburbs!
Anyhow, I bought the screws there and then went to Byko for the timber.

I had intended making a box 25 x 120 x 240 cm since I thought the 6" depth in the squarefoot method was a bit shallow for some things.

Then I decided to make one box 15 x 120 x 120 and another one 30 x 120 x 120. One for salad and flowers and onions and so on, the other for potatoes and carrots etc.

I had a very helpful pwerson in Byko cut the wood for me so I paid 11232 kr for 4 lengths of 2" by 6" pine. After a bit of a struggle he managed to cut it into 120 cm lengths so I got 12 lengths to make 3 boxes - the plan is to stack one on top of the other.

Byko didn't seem to have anything like the laths which the book suggests so I bought one "réttskeiðar" for 762 kr and I am going to try and split it lengthwise into three narrower strips.

The screws were fairly expensive, at 42,75 kr each they came to 1539 kr for 36. I bought 20 smaller ones too for 157 kr, to faster the grid down to the boxes.

I still need to get nuts and bolts or something similar to fasten the grid the way the book shows.

The seedlings are all growing quickly indoors. The weather is still very cold. next week should be warm, then cold again. It might be ok to get the boxes done this weekend and then the potatoes can go in, and the carrots and parsnips can be sown even if it goes cold afterwards.

Finally!

The last sweet pepper plant came through today so that is "all" of the seeds up - in fact some of sweet peas haven't germinated so not sure if they are slow or not happening.

The seedlings are now all in the sunroom and seem to be doing quite well. I'll have to pull them back into the house on Monday as the sunroom floor is being tiled then (finally).

Still haven't done anything much about the squarefoot garden. Bought two 80 litre bags of potting compost so need a bit more of that plus pumice and mushroom compost. Not long to the first day of summer so need to get organised and buy the timber and stuff.
(So far have spent about 6000kr on the compost.)