Various shades of green

Although the title of my previous post suggests the opposite, actually growing greens is very easy. It's the rest of the vegetables I'm worried about. Tonight we enjoyed the first harvest from my vegetable garden. Fresh greens. They smelled wonderful and felt really crispy. Not at all like the greens (Dutch: raapsteeltjes) I usually buy in the supermarket.

I made a risotto and added the greens about halfway through the cooking process.

It tasted really good.

Usually I make stamppot raapsteeltjes with greens (mashed potatoes with butter and milk, a bit of cheese, lots of pepper and finally the greens stirred through), but I didn't have enough greens for that now. Perhaps in a couple of weeks.

Not so green anymore is our Bengeltje. The old girl is 20 and still going strong. She looks good for her age doesn't she? She must have a very strong heart, because she's almost totally deaf and usually fast asleep, so if we want to get her attention we have to touch her. And every time that scares the hell out of her. She's also a bit wobbly on her legs sometimes, but hey, we'll be walking with a Zimmer frame if we've reached her age. Apparently 20 cat years equals about 95 human years. If we are lucky enough to be still walking by that time. Go Bengeltje!

It's not easy growing greens. If you are me.

This year I've finally started the vegetable garden I've always wanted but never dared to create. Hearing stories from several different friends who dug up a part of their garden to grow their own vegetables, carefully sowing tiny seeds in boxes with clear plastic covers in order to give them the best start in life, talking to the little seedlings, playing Bach or Mozart, or whatever music they liked best, to them, fertilizing the soil in the garden, carefully planting them out, reading them bedtime stories, covering them with little blankets, only to find them all eaten by slugs the next morning or ruined by other pests of which there are a lot, prevented me from starting my own vegetable project. I don't like to be disappointed. But the idea of growing our own vegetables stayed with me, somewhere in the back of my head, popping up every now and again. So I plucked up all my courage, picked up a spade and started digging up a small part of the garden that seemed to be a good spot for a vegetable garden. Next to the shed where the pigs live (running water nearby), surrounded on three sides by hedges (sheltered spot), most of the day in the sun (if it shines), and just big enough to try out some veggie growing. I created three beds of about 4 meters by 1 meter and some muscles and backache. Dug loads of well rotted horse manure, of which we have shitloads anyway, into the soil and waited until the weather was warm enough to start sowing. In the meantime I went shopping for vegetable seeds. Preferably not of the kind that need too much nurturing and Bach. Of course I came home with more than those three beds can ever house, but I'm hoping (there is always hope) that this year's crop will be a successful one and that I will be happy to keep the vegetable garden productive for years to come. And then the day the first vegetable seeds could be sown came. It was an exciting day. I carefully read the instructions on the packages and measured out the rows in which to sow the seeds. I'm quite the neurotic and like things to be neat and straight, but I'm not good at getting things neat and straight which is very annoying, so it took some time and several attempts before I was a happy gardener. Then I opened the first package of seeds and scattered a tiny amount in every row that I had made at exactly the right depth. Marking the row with a little metal tag on which I had written the name of the plants to be. And then I waited for signs of little plants to show. And waited. And waited. And... finally, after about three weeks, miniscule little green dots popped up from the soil. We drank a glass of wine to that happy occasion. We will grab any excuse to have a glass of good red or white wine. And then it dawned on me. I had misinterpreted the instructions on the seed packages, which is why it took so long for the little green seedlings to pop up from the soil. You see, I carefully spaced out the rows at the distances shown on the different packages. And then I carefully made the rows as deep as was shown on the different packages. At the time I thought that those seeds had to be sown awfully deep, but hey... I haven't a clue. And certainly not about growing veggies. So I obeyed the instructions. And buried the poor little seeds under far too much soil. Because I understood the left-to-right-arrows to be the distance between the rows and the up-and-down-arrow to be the rowdepth. WRONG! Of course you will understand the instructions immediately if you even glance over them. But then again... you are brilliant! Still, I will not make that mistake again and I didn't sow the broccoli seeds that deep, because I saw the light before I sowed them. Lucky broccoli seeds. They would have never seen the light. They are sweet little seedlings by now and I have high expectations of them. Which I tell them and the others (beetroot, carrots, spring onions, perpetual spinach, leaf lettuce and greens) every day. The leaf lettuce however isn't doing too well. The greens are doing very good and we will have risotto with greens tomorrow. Which will be the first meal we have from our own self sown vegetable garden! White wine me thinks. Mr. RWP and Jay will be very proud that I've even sown broccoli. Once I wrote that it isn't my favourite vegetable. Jay gave me instructions how to cook it and since then I really like broccoli. Mr. RWP was shocked that I didn't like his favourite vegetable. Now I do Mr. RWP. Now I do!

DUCK!

Hi there, it's me again! Yeah, I know. Long time no see (and I'm bowing my head in shame). Anyway, a couple of days ago a friend asked me if I wanted to take some photos of his weird but wonderful ducks and geese. He has quite a collection and needed some photos to show to other duckmad people. And although the photos didn't come out as amazing as I wanted them to be, because I didn't get the settings of my camera quite right so they lack sharpness, stupid me, there are still a couple of shots I wanted to share with you. Please don't ask me what kind of ducks or geese they are. I haven't a clue. But they are wonderful looking creatures.

Not all of them wanted to have their picture taken.

I really hope to be here more often from now on. Turns out that I'm still suffering from the dreaded Lyme disease which makes me sooooo tired sometimes that I can't even speak in my own language. Let alone think or write in another one. But hey... things can only get better ;-)