Garlic and frosts

The garden is full of surprises. The frost has come down so hard that its literally pushed the soil up. It looks like fingers of broken glass reaching up trying to strangle my winter brassicas. Still, so far they look unbothered by the changes in temperature, as does my perpetual spinach.



I popped into the greenhouse last week to pot up my garlic and found my strawberry runners were still producing. Little berries admittedly but they struck me as some sort of miracle, and yet more flowers still coming.



Anyway, garlic, yes. To get the best and earliest garlic you should plant it in Winter i.e. now. In this country this means playing a risky business with supermarket bought garlic as the garden centres do not cater for garlic sets until spring (which is incredibly frustrating). The idea is that the cloves get frozen along with the earth and then begin the growing process the second that the soil warms up enough. This speeds up the entire growing process and enables the plant to start germinating immediately.

I chose to plant my bulbs in individual pots in the greenhouse, this is purely from a practicality standpoint rather than a need of the garlic. I simply don't know exactly what I will put in which bed next year - nor if I will possibly change the layout entirely. It is still good if not better to plant the cloves directly into the soil about 15cm apart in rows and make sure you mark where you plant. If you decide to do as I have and pot them, simply wait for them to become well established before relocating them in Spring. Last year I planted my garlic too close to my potatoes which meant they were overshadowed and didn't reach their full potential. Even on the small side it tasted sweeter and more delicious than any supermarket long stored garlic you buy here.

There are not many problems you can have with garlic except for bolting. This happens when temperature fluctuates wildly - an occupational hazzard living in Iceland - but with garlic that does not mean a ruined crop. The garlic flowers can be eaten and are especially good chopped finely in salads providing a real garlicky tang.

Lemongrass

The fact I am growing this plant is one of the most surprising to people. True, its certainly not something you would imagine successfully grown here in Iceland but it is incredibly easy. The grass can get very tall, about a metre or more and the leaves are not the most attractive but it is one of those plants worth growing if you use it. Store bought lemongrass here in Iceland is expensive, but more than that - what you can get is very far from fresh and that is when you can get it at all. With the exception of the Thai store at Hlemmur (Mai Thai) all of the stalks in the supermarkets are dry and unappealing. I cook a massive amount of Thai food, in all honesty if I didn't have children I would cook it 6 days a week, and this is an ingredient I use frequently.

Considering our location this is a plant for indoors, not in the greenhouse (unless you have a fully insulated heated one). Mine are happily living on the windowsills.



The plant is a slow grower, or at least has to grow for almost a year before the first harvest so patience is prime. I planted mine in late March and harvested for the first time a month ago. I decided to take only a small amount for use and split the rest apart to propagate.

This was as simple as growing the plant - which has literally been sown and watered well as the heat increased. Once the seedlings were strong enough to move I put them in their separate pots to grown on until now. I harvested some stalks, because they resembled the size you buy in the stores, by simply twisting the base until it came away. These I used and also froze a few.

The remaining stems I split into individuals with the roots attached and re-potted them. The idea is that by next Summer I will be harvesting off of each one continuously. The plant is renowned for its sturdiness and once established, it grows quickly and should be able to keep cropping for some years.

We reap what we sow

And we need seeds to sow. Of course I along with most people tend to buy my seed at the garden centres. But if a plant is easy to collect seed from, why not? The majority of the plants in my garden are from seeds purchased in the UK, either because it is infinitely cheaper or because you cannot purchase the variety or type of plant here at all and this increases the benefit of seed saving.

Not being a true expert at seed saving I have opted to go for the plants which have obvious seed pods and am leaving the fleshy stuff (like tomatoes etc) for another year as they require soaking and separating from the pith etc. The process is easy peasy for the seed pods.



Leave the pods to dry on the plant as long as possible, ideally in a cold frame or greenhouse so the light dries them without rain. Pick them, pop them in a paper envelope or if you like your wine as I do, use the brown paper wine bottle bags from Vinbuð, and hang for a while indoors. Preferably somewhere warm, but not the kitchen as the air is moist and will kick off germination, I have chose a windowsill above a radiator. Once you are sure they are completely dry, crack the seed pods and shake the seeds free.

Its best to store them somewhere cool and moisture free. I have wrapped the seeds in marked brown paper bags and placed this inside a tupperware container with some uncooked rice (which absorbs any hint of moisture) and put it in the freezer. We shall see results next season.

Plant Sex and the Busy Bee

"The birds and the bees" is a common phrase to cuteify the act of doing It. But that is literally the case when it comes to your garden. The pollen from the male and female flowers need to mix. In normality most of this is carried out by bees, insects and birds which why there is great concern - and should be your concern - that the global honey bee population is under threat.

When you are growing vegetables indoors and in greenhouses you might need to manually help the process along. With larger flowers on greenhouse plants you simply take the male flower and insert the stamen into the female and allow the pollen to mix. The female flower usually has the beginning of a fruit behind it, but if you are unsure, touch all to all and you've covered the ground. As a general rule when plants first start flowering only male flowers appear, so be patient and don't think something is wrong if you can't instantly find female flowers. Plants most commonly needing this help in your greenhouse include cucumbers, courgettes, squashes, pumpkins etc.



Plants you keep on windowsills indoors will definitely need a hand in this department and often these have smaller flowers. Chilies, peppers and tomatoes all being in this category. For these either take a q-tip and touch the pollen on each flower which will spread it around nicely. Alternatively a common way of doing this with tomatoes is simply give the plant a shake. The pollen puffs off and resettles doing the job just as well.

Even though its against most Icelanders natural instinct, the best thing you can do is encourage bees and other insects to be in your garden and greenhouse. Honestly, I have never seen so many grown (sorry to say it but) women run hysterically screaming around the place as much as when bees are nearby. Fair enough, one is not overly fond of wasps, but the Icelandic population simply isn't used to the number of insects increasingly appearing these days. Global warming has made it easier to grow things here, but as also enabled bugs to exist where they once couldn't.

Wasps are likely to be more aggressive, and can be a garden pest if you are growing fruit, but there are very very few Icelanders currently growing more than redcurrants here. In general its bees which hang around our gardens. In particular bumble bees, and my garden is simply seething with them.

The 'wild' aspect of my garden is rammed with what I assume to be Californian poppies. I let these run wild and they behave like invasive weeds, prolifically self seeding all over the place. They are relatively easy to uproot so they do not bother me if they spread into the veg patch. They have a cottage garden feel about them - a feel I would dearly love to pursue when I own my own property.




During summer nearly every poppy head has a bumble bee in it. It is perfectly normal for me to see over 30 within one glance. I have purposefully spread seeds around my stolen greenhouse to encourage the bees. In addition there is another invasive weed overtaking the area around the greenhouse - Mint. Its about as high as my shoulder, wafts its scent across the garden and its amazing.

Mint is a lethal plant to let lose in your garden if you like it to look well kept. It spreads like wildfire. For my purposes this has been brilliant. The broken lower glass panes of the greenhouse have been covered with the forest of mint growing there, protecting from wind blowing in. In summer whilst it is flowering it's attractive purple blooms they poke through some of the gaps and attract incredible numbers of bees to find their way into the greenhouse and enjoy the rest of the flowering vegetable plants and help them get jiggy at the same time.

Too Hot to Handle

This last year I tried growing two types of chili. Both reportedly high on heat scale. One of these was Hot Teppin and is known for being one of the hottest chilies there are. Sadly my seedlings all died except for one, and the reason why is still not known. The single plant which made it was making its way from my home to the greenhouse when a large gust of wind hit it and me and the plant snapped in two right at the base and never recovered. I could have cried. Icelandic weather 1: Kitty 0.

My chili success story comes in the form of Demon Red. This fine variety of pepper was recently awarded The Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit, known as AGM and from my experience, so it should.

The plant is a dwarf variety and goes no higher than 30cm tall and thusly is perfect on a windowsill, where in all honesty it will do its best in this country (as long as you remember to pollinate). The chilies are on the 'very hot' description - but mine punched my face off when I bit a very small end off to test. I am addicted to incredibly spicy food and ate raw chilies when pregnant, but this is high even on my scale.

The fruit is very small and you get a huge yield per plant. I kept 6 plants as I had been using 4-8 shop bought chilies per week. The plants started fruiting at the end of July and they have just kept on doing so since then. As soon as the fruit is red I snip off the chilies with a little stalk and either use them or simply keep them in a little glass cup to dry.



As there have been so many fruits and they are so incredibly pungent (I am using one of these small chilies where I previously would use 3 Bonus bought ones) I have also put some in olive oil to make garlic and chili oil which I am letting be for a while so the flavour can permeate properly.



These plants have been a complete and utter winner for me. They look good, need absolutely no care except for watering and have produced more fruit than expected. I would buy these again for 2011 if it wasn't for the fact I am adopting a new technique with these and my paprika and attempting to keep the pants alive over winter rather than throw them away as you would tomato plants. Rumour has it that if you succeed, the fruit starts cropping substantially earlier on the second year, with even more of it. Without wishing to be presumptuous I assume that this has not been attempted in Iceland before, or at least not many have. So I am eager to share my results, and will do so here.

Failed: Beetroot

By hook or by crook I will succeed in growing beetroots this coming year. The last two years I have epically failed. The juicy purple wonders always bolt just as they are starting to swell. This has driven me absolutely nuts as I have been using Bolthardy variety. Pft.

This vegetable is supposedly the most trouble free to grow and, as yet, they will not play the game with me. Assessing where I suspect I have gone wrong, my eagerness may be the cause. Usual causes of bolting are dry soil in hot summers - this cause can safely be put aside - and planting the seed too early. 2010 I sowed the beetroot later than in 2009 to try and avoid this but the date was still early April.

For 2011, I have bought a couple of types of beetroot and I plan to sow a few seeds of each variety every 4 weeks and carefully monitor the results. 2010 ended with a grand total of 2 small beetroots and the agony of this was that they tasted like heaven. Nevertheless, we made great use of the plants, picking the beet leaves even though they didn't swell at the root - we harvested all the way until October. These were absolutely delicious in salads and what's more, looked stunning.

Mr Freeze

Well it took its time coming but Winter just arrived. We are bouncing around the zero degrees mark during the daytime and way below at night. A subtle drop of around 10 degrees within 24 hours.

I ran outside and pulled up all of the parsnips still in the ground, figuring I would rather parboil and freeze them in the house than spend an afternoon trying to hack them out with an icepick. The purple sprouting was also harvested - this is supposed to be a little frost hardy but I took what was there just in case. I doubt many more stems will grow now its gotten so cold and much darker, but I left the main plants on the off chance.

The perpetual spinach has yet to be affected by the cold, it has only been 4 days of below zero but its not looking bothered yet. This crop has been providing solidly for 4 months and although perpetual spinach isn't the exact same taste as true spinach, its been used in many dishes and salads.

So, what we are left with now in the garden is a test of supposed winter hardiness. There are January King Savoy cabbages, Tundra cabbages, Winter Pilgrim cauliflowers and Meteor peas. Legend has it that all of these are able to cope with quite a substantial frost. The peas have been growing well and providing crops even this week from my cold frame. Smug is what I'll be if I am actively harvesting in the winter here. We shall see, pride often comes before a fall.

October: My harvest this month

Considering this is Iceland, I have to say even I am little surprised at the amount of vegetables I have been harvesting. It is a particularly mild October so far though - maybe this is global warming making itself known.

From the garden:
Mange tout peas
Spring onions
Spinach
Swiss chard
Parsnips
Carrots
Purple sprouting broccoli
Kale
Peas
Lettuce
Rocket

From the unheated greenhouse:
Coriander
Spring onions
Lettuce
Rocket

From the windowsills:
Tomatoes
Chillies
Aubergines
Peppers
Lemongrass
Parsley
Coriander
Basil
Rosemary

Parsnips

For the love of all that is edible why don't Icelanders grow parsnips? I know some of them do, but its a struggle to get them in supermarkets most of the time and they are ridiculously expensive say compared to carrots. The first times I cooked these delicious daggers for my friends most of them couldn't tell me the name of it in Icelandic, even when I showed them the raw vegetable.

Its Steinseljurót by the way.

And why am I so in shock about this not being a more adopted Icelandic vegetable? Its totally frost hardy that's why. Whereas most of the surprise at what I am growing here is because people didn't think it warm enough, this is a vegetable that is reputed to taste better once its been through a frost or two. Its so apt at coping with frost that I dug some up this spring which had stayed in the ground the entire winter and these were cooked and eaten with glee.

The only issue, which is something on my mind now, is that once the ground freezes properly here, there isn't a hope of digging the crop up until the spring. Its October, and the weather keeps dipping down, flirting with zero degrees, and then wacking us in the face with a 15 degrees here and there.

My garden contains quite a lot of parsnips still, they have been pulled through the last 2 months and eaten as varying sized baby veg for a roast but there are more left in the ground and I am playing chicken with Jack Frost. For safety I really had better pull them this weekend, parboil and freeze on my own terms in my already heavily stacked freezer.




The seed varieties I went for were Countess F1 and White Gem, both of which I am fairly certain you can buy here. In all honesty both varieties have performed well. I heavily sanded the area before planting and this year paid more attention to thinning the seedlings and just as Alan Titmarch always said, the results were infinitely better than my haphazard approach last year.

I planted 4 seeds per hole and then when thinning I removed the weaker, leaving the single strongest one to grow. This is one of the crops which hurts me when I thin it as you can't do anything productive with the thinnings. I much more enjoy this process when you can cook and eat the weaklings - as you can with cabbages as spring greens, turnip tops and young onions used as salad onions. Carrots and parsnips however just go straight to the compost. This is why I stubbornly held back on performing this process correctly last year and received thin underdeveloped - even if still tasty - parsnips.

The crop is a very slow grower, so you need great patience, as even growing as soon as the first frost as passed in spring and the ground is dig-able they take all the way until the first frosts arrive in winter. But they are sown in rows, fairly wide apart and leave space for quick maturing crops to grow in between such as baby carrots, spinach, radishes, turnips and more.

These are my favourite vegetable when it comes to eating. Roasted parsnips taste sweet and caramely and I have yet to meet an Icelander who hasn't loved them after tasting a slow roasted snip.



Summary:
Plant: March/April
Harvest: September/October
Soil: No organic matter the same season. Needs to be sandy/extremely well dug.
Problems: For me, none so far.
Maintenance: Zero apart from challenging any weeds.

Compost

The ultimate in recycling. You actually eat what you throw. Sort of.
Composting is taking very seriously by the English. Some of my first memories involve toddling with my Grandfather to his compost heap and watching him turn this mass of weird smelling stuff and wondering why he was so precious about it.

Now I am hungry for masses and masses of my own compost. Buying bags of mold is a pricey business and I fill a lot of pots. Luckily my rather friendly neighbours offered a generous amount of their 2 metre high pile for this season. But after 8 wheelbarrows of the stuff I still needed more and felt there was a limit on decency.

Now I have several different piles all over my garden rotting away - some mixed with the year before's waste. I put as much of my vegetable waste in as possible but tend not to include the fruit stuff as a) the worms aren't keen on citrus and I am citrus heavy and b) during the few days the stuff stays in its bucket in the kitchen it spreads banana flies which Iceland's supermarkets seem to be ideal at spreading. I have no idea why this is but no matter where I buy fruit from there are always fruit flies in my house if I leave anything lying around for more than a few days. Yuck.

Anyway, good compost. What does this consist of then? Well I have read various guides and even some specific measurements but basically from what i can tell and have experienced about half green stuff to brown stuff does the trick.

Green stuff is mostly garden waste of cut grass, kitchen waste and weeds which are not perennial or containing seeds - my general rule is if its a git to get out of your garden, do not compost it!
Other 'green' things which are great for the compost are manure - horse manure being the most likely in this country. Tea and coffee is excellent for the compost heap.
And the one less likely to be delivered by us lady gardeners - pee. Yes, urine is a great catalyst.

Brown stuff includes paper (best ripped up), cardboard - old loo rolls are perfect, twigs, old plants and their roots, hedge clippings etc.

Things you dont compost are: Dairy and meat products. Pet poo such as dogs and cats as the risk of disease if high. Plastics. Nappies.

Where do you put all this?
There are many proper compost bins available from places like Byko and Blómaval etc but you can easily make your own compost bin or do like I have and simply make piles.
This method takes a bit longer for the compost to decompose properly but I don't want to spend the money on a bin I will blatantly overfill anyway.

You need to turn the stuff a few times, or even better - once a month, but here in Iceland when the stuff's frozen in winter there's little point in turning, or attempting to turn it as the decomposition is on pause then anyway.

The further away from freezing you can get it, the better. In the UK old carpet is a popular cover but seeing how Icelanders don't really use carpet much Its easier to use some old thick blanket which is on its way to the bin anyway.
Alternatively you can cover the whole thing in thick cardboard and keep bricks on top to prevent the wind taking it off.

Admittedly this is not a pretty thing, so if you're bothered by that, invest in buying or building your own compost bin or structure. I would most definitely be looking to erect a fence of sorts around my compost area if I owned my property.

The next most valuable material you can make yourself is Leaf mold. In the UK, this is always referred to as valuable. Its incredibly good for your soil and you need a lot of leaves to make not so much of the stuff. But here, in Iceland, with the general lack of trees - its like gold dust.
I will be marching around my neighbourhood with a wheelbarrow offering to clear some driveways in return for keeping the leaves.

Its very easy to make. Take big plastic bin bags and fill them with leaves. Pour about 2 cups of water in with them, shake it well. pop a few holes in the bottom and leave them somewhere out of the way to rot. You can use this the next year to use as mulch or rot for 2 years to use as a very good soil conditioner.

Waste not want not as my grandmother always says.

Adopt-a-plant

In spring 2009 I set all my little magic seeds in their pots, all safely sealed inside Ikea freezer bags (which incidentally were perfect for this purpose) and waited not so patiently to see which ones would wake up and want to play.

It seemed that nearly every single one of them wanted to play. The house was utterly overwhelmed with seedlings. There was not a single windowsill with any space at all, and my home has a lot of wide windowsills. Realising that I would not, under any circumstance, require over 80 tomato plants, more than 40 aubergine plants and many others I came up with an idea.

The group I started on Facebook provided this solution. I advertised when I had seedlings available and what types, together with what sort of home they needed (garden, balcony, windowsill). Then people came and collected what they wanted in return for a bag of mold.

This will be what I will do next season as well, and would love to get people involved who would like to swap plants as well. So, if you are based around Reykjavík area please add yourself to the group.

Crop rotation

Some people find the idea of this a bit complicated but unless you are deciding to become an arable farmer its a very simple thing.

Just don't grow the same vegetable family in the same space next year.

The reason for this is
a) to avoid continuing soil bound diseases and pests from season to season and
b) because different types of plants take different types of nutrients from the soil and it enables the soil to recover more quickly.

For the kitchen gardener there are the following main groups of vegetable plants:
* Brassicas (cabbage family including swede)
* Potato family (potato being the only one we grown outdoors in Iceland)
* Legumes (bean family)
* Onion family (garlic, onions, leeks etc)
* Root veg (carrots, parsnips, beetroots)

You don't need to have this many beds, I for example choose to put the potatoes with the onion family. The main focus for a smaller vegetable garden is to keep the brassicas separate as they can encounter more problems and rotating them is fairly critical. It also makes sense to keep crops which require similar soil together and brassicas love the soil to be very firm and compacted around their bases.

If you only have potatoes and a few other veg, just swap the two beds, its not ideal but its better than doing nothing.

Planning

The level of your gardening results will more or less be dependent on your level of preparation slash planning. Some people find this bit very leiðinlegt. I am not one of those people.

A friend of mine once asked me if I really had excel spreadsheets to make things easier or if I had things to do purely so I could make excel spreadsheets.

So my season 2011 spreadsheet was more or less completed this week. This is not something most people need to distress themselves over, its just my OCD nature creeping into every aspect it can. But if you are planning on growing more than a few varieties of plants it pays to make notes of what you planted, when you planted it, where you planted it etc. so that you can learn from your experience next year. Even with my excel mastery I ended up shoving some seeds and seedlings in gaps when they came about and now have no idea which type of carrot was which - and one was substantially better than the others.

The details I have decided noteworthy are;

Variety of the type
Seed brand
Date from and until the seeds can be sown
Where they can be sown (pot, bed, greenhouse)
When I actually sowed
When the plants germinated
When I planted out
General comments



As well as this paperwork of sorts, it pays to prepare the area you are going to plant. Unless you are creating a container garden and only need to fill your pots, which I have to say is infinitely easier to manage both from a soil preparation and weeding standpoint.

I am not one for digging I have to say. However the garden where I live was embedded with several years of established perennial weeds, with whom I am in continual war. Coltsfoot being the absolute git of weeds. And no matter how much I battle, it exists in my neighbour's garden so can always creep its way back.

My standard preparation has involved turning the soil after this summer's crops were cleared. I still have quite a few winter veg in the beds though, but as these are cleared I will gradually set my 2009 now well rotted compost on the beds and let the worms gradually incorporate it into the soil. I did consider sowing some green manures to cover the empty plots and protect the nutrients from escaping but as with most things here in Iceland, the seeds were incredibly pricey so I will defer that until next year.

I take some time to roughly plan what I will be planting in which bed so that I can treat the bed appropriately. Some vegetable families like very firm soil, some want immense amounts of organic matter and some don't want to be near a patch which has been composted for at least a year. For these reasons some amount of planning is necessary, not forgetting the all important crop rotation.


As soon as the soil defrosts in spring I will turn the soil a little again, weed out whatever I can get my hands on (knowing more will grow later) and add more compost to the beds in which I will be planting plants that appreciate it - this is not all vegetables so I recommend checking first. It is also in spring that I add general fertilizer, preferably organic - I am going to try and get some blood, fish and bone next year.

Its at this point I will also mix in a heavy amount of sand for my root vegetable patch. I tried to avoid doing this in 2009, after all I was gardening whilst heavily pregnant and tried to cut as much gruntwork out as possible, but the bottom line is - carrots and parsnips simply do not work in unprepared soil. They split at every point they hit a hard surface and beyond the look, it makes them hard to cook. This year I bothered and have been rewarded with rather handsome fleshy daggers.

For the love of Lettuce

The easiest and most worthy crop for anyone living in Iceland to grow is salad. Not only is this a ridiculously easy, low maintenance crop, it saves you more money than any other, with the exception of fresh herbs. Salad leaves can be grown by almost anyone, you can use a windowsill, a windowbox, balcony, patio or garden. It really is an access all areas type of crop.

The variety of salad leaves available is quite astounding, although locally there are less, there are still great 'mixed leaves' seed packets. Included in the selection available in Iceland are seed mats. These are circular pieces of a sort of blotting paper with the seeds embedded. This gives the learner gardener a sure fire way of planting - simply pop the paper on top of a pot of compost and cover with the recommended amount of compost on top. These mats are more expensive, but if you're unsure of your skills its a great starter.

You can also purchase 'plugs' of lettuces for you to replant. Lollo Rosso being one of my favourites. These produce great cut-and-come-again lettuces. I recommend buying 5 or more, then you just cut a leaf or two off of these for each meal and can afford to harvest daily. As I am a salad lover and like to have some fresh green accompanying most dishes this season I had 8 individual cut and come agains plus at least 4 pots of mixed leaves at all times.


Rocket plants are also available in the mixed leaf packs with their own rocket selections. I added to these with some 'true' rocket plants which I swapped with a friend, Klara for some other surplus plants. Rocket is particularly hardy as a lettuce and will last longer outdoors than lighter green leaves. I harvested some from the garden only this weekend.

There are also quite a few 'winter' lettuces to grow in a cold frame slash unheated greenhouse. They are called winter from a UK perspective, so I am adapting that to mean late autumn slash pre frost winter here. I have 2 types which I am sowing now, Cos 'Winter Gem' and Cos 'Winter Density'. These are the small tight crisp lettuces which are sweet and crunchy. I'll get back to you on how late through the season they keep going.

My 'Stolen' Greenhouse

Through these posts you will see I refer to my stolen greenhouse. This is a greenhouse on the property behind the house we rent. It was full of rubbish and broken glass, panes missing and weeds to the roof. The back of it opens onto my garden.

Seeing that it wasn't in use, I went to the property and asked if I could use it. The tenants living at the house didn't have any interest and so I began using it in 2009. Since then, 2 different groups of people have moved in and out of the house and stare at me wondering what I am doing there, often cackling like a mental patient on my stool, covered in compost. Cackling because I nearly always take Ricky Gervais podcasts to keep me company.

The garden of that house has been wall to wall weeds and the photo used as my background here is of that. As this has meant I have to constantly fight a losing battle against them spreading into my veg patch I have internally justified my use of the greenhouse in return. I have knocked on the door a few times trying to get the landlord's number but always manage to catch them when they are not there.

Recently, yet another new set of tenants have moved in. This coincided with the weed jungle being hacked down and so has set me on edge that my squatting will soon be put to an end. Yet the tall wild flowers and tangle of mint which has grown around the glasshouse blocking access from the owners side were left alone. Let's hope I get to continue using this increasingly important part of my armory as there is no hope of me affording to buy my own.

A is for Aubergine

I picked my first ever Aubergines last night. Its October 11th. That is a bizzare experience. I planted my seeds back in April on a windowsill in the house.


But in the end of May I popped the plants out in my stolen greenhouse. This is where I went wrong. No matter how optimistic you are, aubergines are not going to grow outdoors in Iceland. If I had a proper greenhouse which was fully insulated I believe it would have been best, but seeing as my greenhouse is a rescued one, with many panes missing and patched up with plastic, the plants were not quite warm enough to maintain their full speed growth.



Aubergines have a long sow to harvest period as it is, and they need constant warmth to get to their best. My plants started to flower in August. I opted to bring a few of the plants indoors again to a windowsill as the temperature started dropping and as soon as they were warmed up the flowers started to turn into fruits.


Of course I helped these along with a little improvised plant sex, something a few people who adopted my homeless plants didn't know, or at least forgot. When you have fruiting plants indoors where there are no friendly bees to help pollinate, you have to do the job with hand pollination. Take a cotton bud and touch the pollen on the flowers and dip on the next, and the next and so on.



SUMMARY:
Plant: February/March
Harvest: August/September
Soil: Compost / Grow bag soil
Problems: Needs to be indoors or in a fully insulated greenhouse to produce here
Maintenance: Tie up stems as it grows (as per tomato plants), needs tomato feed, nip out tips once it reaches 30cm. Remember to pollinate if its indoors.

Tangled mass

My name is Kitty. I moved to Iceland from the UK in early 2006. After a few years djing, running my art project and running riot I moved in with my partner and had a baby. Life changes and so did the country. I was already sick to the back teeth of buying overpriced overstored close to rotting 'fresh' vegetables in the supermarkets here, but since the crash (kreppa) the prices have skyrocketed and the quality plummeted even further.

Although most of the decade before relocating was spent in London, I come from the countryside and my stepfather always grew more varieties of fruit and vegetables than Bonús has ever stocked. I grew some vegetables in London whenever I had the rare space to do so but since moving into my first family home there has been space to do more.

Not being someone who does things by halves, 2010 was my second year trying to grow in Iceland and I took on 76 varieties, all of which I aim to discuss on here amongst the rest of the drivel I spout as time rolls by. The process has involved taking English ways of doing things and having to feel my way around, altering for the climate and availability of paraphernalia as well as bringing various seeds back into the country from shopping trips in the UK.

My interest in gardening has grown from many levels of enjoyment. Desire to provide my family with fresh vegetables, engaging the kids in how to grow things with the excitement which comes from it - as well as having somewhere to escape the family and gather my thoughts, have some quiet time. Honestly I can feel as exhausted and stressed out as I feel possible and 15 minutes in the fresh air and investigating what new development is going on in the many pots and beds and I am reborn.


Many Icelanders have been a bit astonished at what I have managed to achieve here and after getting regular calls for advice and visitors to the garden I decided to start documenting it. Anyone following my 'general' blog will be aware that with work, family, art and of course, gardening I don't always update regularly. But I have the best intentions.

Let's see if I can keep this going.

The way in which this blog unfolds will be all over the shop. Rants, advice, info, excitement, mobile updates, quick tips, photos... whatever. My idea is to spend the winter, whilst there is little practical gardening to do, regaling my experience of the last seasons, and my plans for the next.

Therefore I plan to use the labels pretty heavily so you have any chance of finding anything. I will also be cross referencing my own posts wherever possible to save repeating myself. So this blog won't operate as per a usual diaryesque blog, at least not until the Spring. So utilise the 'search this blog' on the right, and the labels.

I hope you get something from this, even if its only from a voyeuristic enjoyment.