Last week before the rain, I decided to do some additional fertilization and sow some more vegetables. This year, instead of cow pelleted manure I bought a grocery sold manure. The pelleted manure which is sold in our normal stores is packed in smaller bags and can be bought at all times. Cow pelleted manure is sold in 25kg bags, and it is a problem to handle. I can’t bring it to the basement on my own, and I need buckets to move it from the basement to the garden. The grocery sold fertilizers are actually not much worse than the big bagged ones. Still, I’ll use these ones more often, so the result should be similar.

I’ve already fertilized the garden in March and added some eggshells to the holes before the sowing and now it was time for some additional pellets. I did the fertilization before the rain for one simple reason: I don’t have to bury the pellets. The rain has melted them in the soil, and there was no need for digging and burying the pellets. I’ve just spread them around the plants and left them like this. Luckily the rain wasn’t stormy and didn’t wash any of the pellets away. The rain fell slowly and melted the pellets slowly. I need to dig the garden after the rain anyway, so I’ll mix the soil after rain digging. I’ve fertilized everything but the carrots and beans. Carrots don’t like to be freshly fertilized, they prefer to grow on the surface that was fertilized last year, and beans fertilize themselves. 

I already wrote that I bought more seeds, and after the fertilization, I decided to use the seeds for the main garden. The reason why I’ve sown them now is the same, the rain would take care of the seeds and I don’t need to water the beds. Watering all the plants was difficult as is, adding more beds with fresh seeds would just be too hard. Now with the rain, it was the perfect time to sow.

I’ve sown some additional, chard, carrots, cucumbers, and parsley. The reason is that most of those plants didn’t germinate as they should have. Only the chard did germinate enough, I’ve just sown more rows to have continuous production. 

The story with parsley and carrots is getting worse every year. Most of the seeds never germinate. We sow bags and bags of seeds and get only a couple of plants. This is not related only to my garden, most people in the village have the same problem, and probably the whole country experiences the same issue. Carrot seeds that are sold here have a germination rate of 60-65% depending on the manufacturer. In reality, that number is even lower. We constantly need to do additional sowing of the rooted veggies to have any vegetables. 

This year wasn’t any different. The carrots germinated poorly. Out of the whole bed maybe 40% is covered in carrots. I can’t say that this year the problem is lack of heat. With the warm May, the conditions for germination were perfect, and still half of the seeds were dead. The situation with parsley is even worse. I didn’t get a single plant this year. There have been a couple of parsnips, but parsley none. I’ve sown 3 different varieties and nothing. 

This is why I decided to convert the parsley bed into a new cucumber bed and sow some more cucumbers here. There’s no point in having an empty bed just because I named this bed “parsley bed” in the beginning. I’ve dug holes on the bed, and I’ve sown cucumbers here. If by some miracle, parsley decides to show up it won’t be an issue since the cucumber grows above the soil and parsley under the soil. I’ve also sown some curly parsley to see if maybe I’ll have more luck with this one.

I still have some empty spaces in the main garden, but those will be filled with more seedlings. Who knows what kind of weather we’ll have from now, so it’s better to grow them closer to water. At least I won’t need to carry additional buckets around.