The first fieldwork 👨‍🌾 of the year 📷

#Hello, Hive Gardeners! 👨‍🌾 📷

We’ve started working in the garden, and just as I’ve done for the past three (or four, I can’t quite remember) years, I’ll be posting updates here from time to time as I make progress growing my own vegetables.

Spring is in full swing here, which means it’s time to work in the field, which my wife (and sometimes our kids) and I have been tending for seven years now, with varying degrees of success. We try to keep this process as natural as possible, without artificial fertilizers or pesticides to control weeds and pests, so that everything is as biologically sustainable as possible - if only so I know what I’m eating.

Why we didn’t start earlier this year might be a question, but here everything depends on the weather. The weather has been very unstable and capricious over the last two months—a few days of rain, a few days of sun; it even snowed two weeks ago. In short, the ground was too wet, almost swampy, to do any work on it.

Well, it’s been sunny and dry for a week now; there’s no more mud in the field—in fact, it looks more like a meadow because after last season we left everything untouched; we didn’t clear anything out; whatever survived kept growing, and whatever didn’t just dried up. Lots of dandelions :)

We usually use dry compost briquettes for fertilizing, but this year, after five years, we managed to get a trailer load of real manure, which is said to be the best fertilizer.

First, I cleared the field where the potatoes will be planted, then loosened the soil with a motocultivator and spread manure.

Then I loosened and mixed the soil two more times with a motocultivator.

Next, I made rows so we could plant the potatoes. We actually planted fewer potatoes than in previous years because yields have never been very high. It was already late, but we managed to get it done. Quite a bit of work for a single Friday afternoon :)

The next day, Saturday, the weekend, we started early in the morning. The potatoes are in the ground, and some vegetables from last year are still growing in the field—winter lettuce, radicchio, and garlic planted last November and surviving the winter. We left those; it would be a pity to destroy them if we can eat them while the new ones are growing :)

The process was the same as the previous day. First, weeding; then loosening the soil with a tiller; spreading manure; and again mixing the manure and soil. Meanwhile, my wife was planting early peas.

We worked on that until late afternoon. Next week, if it doesn’t rain, I’ll have to start working on the other part of the meadow - oops, the field :)

To wrap things up, here’s a short video, namely, Ecency front-end for the Hive blockchain now allows you to insert Shorts - 3spk short videos in posts (and on Waves). Here’s one of my attempts for fieldwork.

https://play.3speak.tv/embed?v=seckorama/93cxu2n0

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