It is a big joy to see the plants you cared about growing, flowering and producing fruits and vegetables. Having a garden gives an opportunity not only to grow your own vegetables, but also enjoy little self-made-nature, particularly if we mention current situation (telework, 24/7 locked in a small room, etc). This is sort of an escape, as result of the current COVID-19 people are changing their housing preferences, like the following article suggesting the urge of having a balcony.
A small garden in the balcony with automatic irrigation system
However, growing plants require continuous care. The most time consuming part is irrigation and it is the part that should have no room for failure. Just forget to water your plants in a few scorching summer days and all your efforts will go in vain. Luckily, automatic irrigation systems exist in the market. I decided to invest on a brand irrigation timer and sprinklers and pipes and then I set them up in my garden. Now that the most time consuming task is done automatically, the only thing left then is to fertilize occasionally the soil and sit behind and watch with joy the growing plants. Well, that is what I thought.
A couple of slugs enjoying tabehodai inside my paprika
My last year gardening experience showed that slugs are not only capable of halting shinkansen operation, but also wreak havoc in your garden and harm your babies whom you gave part of your soul to grow. At the beginning of spring when I saw them for the first time, slugs looked so cute and I didn’t see what they were capable of. As the lettuce started growing, they began to have vegetables tabehodai every night. Even worse, they were waiting for my paprika to reach the ripening stage. Then an army of these little cute monsters jumped on them and made holes at every paprika leading them to perish just a fews days before the due date to collect them. Since then, I learned a few methods to get rid of slugs. This year, I used a copper ring method and it has been successful to prevent slugs midnight raids so far.
Nevertheless, last year was a fruitful year, even though I couldn’t reach self-sufficiency of vegetables, I could have several dishes with vegetables freshly picked from my garden. The most successful plants were tomatoes, piments, eggplants and parsley.
Harvest at the end of the week
From a cost point of view, the investment on the infrastructure costs more than the value of the vegetables collected. However, in this second season, I expect the returned value will exceed the initial investment.
Author: Mahdi
