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I took a week of vacation last week away from home and the garden. I was a bit worried what would happen if my garden was left by itself at the peak of the season. The weather turned out to be windy and wet (and so did my vacation ), and below is a series of photos showing what I found when I returned home, but be warned – it’s not a pretty sight … actually it’s rather awful.

First of all most of the apples blew right of the apple trees before they had a chance to mature, due to the strong wind:

Fortunately my girlfriends dad cleaned up the lawn while we were away – thanks Peder!

This pile of rotting apples is a heaven for sugar craving wasps, but I managed to save some of the apples for jam. There are still some left on the trees so I think we’ll be able to make a decent amount of jam:

Before I left I wrapped my chicken coop project in a tarpaulin and it stayed on the coop the whole week, although the sharp edges punched a few holes in it:

I’m really looking forward to some dry weather so that I’ll be able to finish the project.

The rain water collection tank proves that the weather has been wet, wet, wet. 550 liters in a week:

It turns out that if bird droppings end up in a tank like this you’re likely to get a problem with bacteria if the water is standing still for too long. This can be a problem if you water crops which are not boiled before you eat them since the bacteria is carried into the kitchen.

My bean trellis took a hit by the strong wind and almost collapsed:

But the beans are have been growing fast and new ones are still developing:

My sweet corn plants have also been hit by the wind and one of the plants fell over. Not a pretty sight but hopefully we’ll get some fruits before the end of the season:

The squash plant didn’t waste any time – compare the fruits with my foot to the right:

The fruit near the ground is huge! But I knew that would happen. You need to check the size of your squash fruits every second day during the peak of the season. The same thing happened with my squash a couple of years ago.

Two different kinds of caterpillars in my broccoli?? Jebus… You guys must be hungry. It doesn’t even look tasty anymore:

The strawberry plants decided to grow all over the place:

and the tomato plants got hit with blight and the fruits are rotting… Sigh. :

I hope I can do a bit of damage control by removing wilted leaves and rotten fruits, to help the healthy tomatoes through the season.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a thriving cucumber plant with flowers and healthy fruit:

but my saved pea seeds looked far from healthy. I made the mistake of throwing the pods in a cardboard box with the lid on, so that the moisture couldn’t escape freely which resulted in mold, and some of the peas even started germinating! 2 x sigh… :

To finish off this crappy status, all of the potato fruits fell off and started rotting on the ground:

But then again – the flowers are nice:

I’ll leave you with a lonely bee on a white Cosmos flower:

and a video that show the fencing around my garden that is supposed to shield off against the wind, dammit:

That’s exactly what organic farmers have been doing. They’ve been taking age old ideas and just doing them much better. Making better compost, setting up better crop rotations, figuring out different ways in which there is a symbiosis between different parts of the biology on a farm.

– Eliot Coleman

I brought my 1,000 liters (264 gallons) water tank with me from the old place thinking I would set it up again to collect water for the kitchen garden from a roof top. Fortunately a nice big roof is available here with rain gutter:

The ground has a heavy slope which means that the water tank is standing on the ground about half a meter (1.6 ft) below the floor of the carport.

I found out that I had a bit of cleaning to do of the gutter which had been neglected by the previous renters. It simply won’t work with all that organic material stuck in the gutter:

I managed to unhook the gutter to ease access:

And found this – the gutter was absolutely stuffed:

But I don’t mind – it’s actually very good material for composting, and almost entirely decomposed. I’m wondering how long it’s been in there A couple of years maybe?:

Yummy! The worms in the compost pile are going to love it (along with the kitchen scraps, tomatoes, cucumbers, kitchen paper rolls and what not):

I gave the rain gutter a thorough hosing to clean it up as I don’t want too much crap in my water tank:

And now on to the clever part of this project: A water “thief” (I don’t know the English word for this baby ):

This is a device you insert somewhere in the rain water drain pipe which will divert the water flow away from the main pipe and into a tank or whatever.

And this is an illustration showing what’s on the inside:

Only when the small pipe on the right side is full of water it will start to pour over the edge on the inside and down into the main pipe. Until then most of the water goes into the small pipe, but of course a small part of it will fall into the opening in the middle, but I don’t think it will be anything significant.

This next picture is showing the piece inserted in the main pipe:

Because of the sloping ground the small diverting pipe needs to be 4 m (13 ft) which makes the whole thing look like something from a cartoon :

but hey – it works®!:

I’m ready for the rain.