Posted by Skud on November 28, 2012 at 11:53 and edited at December 17, 2012 at 23:50

There's no way to comment/respond to updates yet other than post my own, so that's what I'm doing. I just wanted to say how exciting it was to see Larry and Liz's updates show up in my RSS reader. Thanks for coming and trying things out!

Larry, I'm envious of your apple trees and your readily available nettles. Would you believe nettles are actually kind of hard to find here? There are some around – I saw some behind a fence tonight – but not in the wild abundance I've seen in parts of Europe.

Liz, that sounds like a great autumn crop. Lettuce in a greenhouse in late fall/winter sounds great. I'm having lettuce envy … it's late spring here and already too hot for growing that sort of thing. Tomorrow will be 38C which is about 100F. I'm going to have to go out early to water everything, and again in the evening, but hopefully the tomatoes, tomatillos, zucchini, cucumbers, etc will enjoy it.

My other recent garden activity was to rehabilitate a little garden bed next to the shed, which the landlords had planted with some ugly spiky shrub things that sent out stalks with seedpods that got infested with little spiders. I dug it out and then turned the whole bed – which had kind of sandy, dry, uninspiring soil – into a sort of half-dig bed, i.e. a cross between a no-dig and a traditional one. I half-assedly broke up some patches of soil and mixed them with a little bit of compost, and put some herbs there that were previously in big pots: sage, oregano, thyme, and a random geranium that was here when we moved in. I couldn't dig deep enough to make proper holes for them, though, so they were standing out of the bed in a really awkward way. So I just heaped up compost and mulch around them to a height of, oh, 20cm or so, and I'm hoping they do okay.

I was going to post some before and after photos but I can't find the widget that lets me get the pix off my camera. Anyone know where I left it? Oh well, here's the before photo:

Here's an "after" photo of the bed on the opposite side of the fence, which is a bit more advanced but otherwise similar. It's got mint, lemon balm, catnip, vietnamese mint, parsley, rainbow chard, sorrel, and what someone told me the other day is a young loquat tree – the latter was planted by an ex housemate and I didn't really want to dig it up, but didn't have any particular affection for it either until I found out that it was a food plant.