THE STORY OF TALLBACKA GARDEN ACCORDING TO OUTI 2015 - 2023
The Tallbacka property, which is in the Rödjan district of Pargas/Parainen town, changed owners on 1st of August 2015. A new home was the goal but also a plot big enough for a garden. There were a few other properties in the area having the same specs but they were not particularly suited for cultivation. Tallbacka felt like home almost immediately, it was the right distance from town but still passably isolated and the lie of the land felt right. To the north there was a ridge and the soil quality seemed good. This garden had been cultivated before (the house was built in 1957) but the evidence for this had all but vanished. The field was covered in man-high mugwort (wormwood) and lupins. The berry bushes had lost the will to live.
What a great opportunity to do just about anything!
There were a few apple trees in the garden, an oak and a fine beech tree (unusual in these parts). The old wells were still there so we could still use the water from them. At some time an ‘unnecessary’ ditch had been dug between the house and the field which we had filled in. The field was ploughed in the autumn and in the spring of 2016 we started a helter-skelter ride into our dream. At that time the plan was no more than to grow “as many berry bushes and as many types as possible”.
2016
It was hard work and took a long time to clear the ground and restore the soil for cultivation. There were perennial weeds, bush wood and the usual annual weeds in endless amounts. Slowly and surely, using evenings and free days from work, the amount of arable land increased. We bought our first plants on the 16th of April. My plans were in no way ready and I never thought of using any unusual or possibly even cleverer ways of working. One thing was certain, however, the soil was amazing! It was fine and strong, black and soft. It felt wonderful under bare feet. The sun warmed it and Sera, our dog, became accustomed to her new life as a garden dog. As I put the peas in I remember the wonderful feeling of happiness come over me. Home at last!
We purchased raspberries and currants from Mattilan Taimisto in Nousiainen. A little too early, of course and the plants had to wait to be planted. Chokeberries (Aronia) were already in the plans and added dried and crushed make morning yoghurt taste heavenly. An absolutely necessary plant! We bought sea buckthorn (Hippophae) shrubs as well and of course we had to have gooseberries. We drew up the plans and the plants were planted in rows. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else just then. Aesthetics and variation would be provided by paths, plant colours and shape.
We needed to realise the planting quickly to get a harvest. We started by planting a herb garden which consisted of 14 pallet collars on the sunny, hard as stone, south side of the house. The grassy area underneath was just building rubble so we covered it with landscaping fabric. We put down concrete flagstones as a path between the pallet collars. It’s great drawing up plans and I piously examined basic plans for herb gardens. I was dreaming of box hedging. We painted the pallet collars with a brick red paint as a joint decision and have always used that colour since. The first days of May were happy and hot. Just think what we can plant in 14 pallet collars…
Fours years on from these pictures and I’m thinking of the enormous change in thinking that we have made. In 2016 we wanted to cultivate berries and vegetables but now we want to cultivate the SOIL. Even though the newly weeded soil was wonderful it pains us to see it bare, exposed to drought and erosion. I couldn’t see past just clearing and cultivating the earth. An heir of slash and burn agriculture?
Mulching was not unknown to me. I knew it was good to get a good thick layer of mulch around the new plants to prevent water loss and weeds. The necessary mulch, amounts and prices felt insuperable.
The planting continued gradually and the plan materialised. I wanted to divide the old garden in two with a diagonal path bordered with fruit trees. I searched a long time for the right alignment before the perfect angle was found. It felt as though I was looking for an earlier structure that had been forgotten. When the right alignment was found it felt natural.
The plants were planted slowly, there was so much other work that had to be done. The more or less unused cellar in the house had to be cleared and painted. We needed a place for the garden tools so we built a shed. After that we started to build a garage/storeroom. The house was ready for building inspection in the first autumn. This was all necessary but took both time and money. I was starting to get really nervous. The garden project wasn’t advancing at all as I had hoped. We had planned and cleared and now winter was coming. We needed a fence around the garden.
When I lived in Sauvo I had protected the fruit trees with separate netting constructions. There I had problems with hares. But in Parainen there were large numbers of roe deer and white-tailed deer. The threat was 24/7 and something had to be done. We bought impregnated posts and deer fencing and then started work. The first phase of building the deer fence was to stand on the garden ladder and pound the posts into the ground with a sledgehammer. The final part of the fencing was nailed to the posts in an icy November sleet. The ends of the fencing were nailed to the buildings with the help of posts. The main idea was to close off the enemy’s food routes before the arrival of winter. We just about managed.
2017
During the winter of 2016/2017 my life’s centre of gravity moved to the archipelago. I started as a lone church caretaker in Nauvo and this new job, with its many challenges took all my strength for a long time. Spring eventually came, as it does. The final wages from my last job had a definite address. We needed mulch for tees and shrubs! In retrospect I was sure then and am still sure that the investment kept the garden alive during the following drought-ridden summers. 50 m³ of woodchips -worth every cent!
In the spring of 2017 we planted several hundred strawberry plants. The later sort was the dark and tasty Malwina, which became our absolute favourite. Technically, the start was difficult. The soil was too soft after cultivation and the planting depth didn’t go right. It was a costly learning curve in many ways and hard work as well.
The “old garden” started to look good for the summer. Greens and onions, Jerusalem artichokes and hyssop – I collected the plants I loved. The berry bushes and herbs were growing really well. The garden was being extended outside the netting towards the road. The blueberry bush “pioneers” tried to adapt to the soil’s pH which was too alkaline. It was during the autumn that the thought of growing produce to sell first came. Up until then I had thought that I would eat all the berries myself (yes, really!)
2018
We did a lot of planning work during the winter. The Tallbacka logo first saw the light of day. The Tallbacka Teddy loves fruit and berries! Felling trees was also part of the program as was the new fence work. We got a great tip from retired garden consultant Sven Engblom. We could get the fence material free of charge provided we did the work ourselves. We couldn’t hammer these posts in by hand but the final result was magnificent. Now, the whole garden was protected from deer and towards the east and Sydmovägen we got a 4 m wide, sturdy gate. We laid a drainage pipe in the old ditch that had divided the garden and re-covered it. Sera got something new to sniff in the form of a pile of soil.
The newest part of the garden also needed a plan but here we couldn’t agree. One upshot of the “conflict” was that we started the second truffle cultivation in Parainen. A large part of the newer garden was two triangles of hazel and oak impregnated with truffle mycelia. They will become a future truffle grove. The plan has a similar triangular structure, a 3 m. wide green road in the spirit of Tolkien that goes through the centre of the area.
Everything seemed fine when spring came. The wonderful light!
We started repairing the roof. The chimney was rebuilt and the tiles were taken down. A lot of work but the competent workers worked safely and to timetable.We now started to plant the new side. We had ordered plants from Savonlinnan Taimisto: three varieties of gooseberry, three of blue-berried honeysuckle and also service tree or sorb tree, elderberry and Turkish hazel. Through Lars Ingman of Baltic Tryffel Ab we ordered the Finnish grown hazel and oak trees whose roots were impregnated with truffle mycelia from France and Hungary.
Everything was OK. Suddenly it wasn’t. We were surprised by illness at the end of May and we got to see how fragile life is. The rest of the year was spent in rehab, both mental and physical.
Despite everything we didn’t have enough mulch to cover the soil and protect the new plantings. The simmer of 2018 was indescribably dry. It’s a wonder that everything didn’t die. We just didn’t have enough energy or water for that matter to water the plants enough. The berry bushes and fruit trees suffered and you can still see the signs. Growth has been weak these first two years. Insects have caused damage and the fruit harvest has been ridiculously low.
A bad start for us and a serious warning. You must be able to water the plants enough and evaporation must be reduced to a minimum. We must save water in every possible way. I cleared the weeds into a huge pile. I don’t know if that was wise but being so tired I couldn’t have done anything else. It was somehow calming to weed. The pile became a compost for a future pumpkin harvest.
We had a party at the beginning of September and invited lots of friends. The vicar Henric Schmidt started the proceedings by blessing the garden. It was rather tragi-comic that after the dry and worrisome summer the heavens opened and the guests had to pack themselves in the garage. Only a few brave souls braved the rain and took a tour in the “party room”.
2019
In January 2019 it was winter. We haven’t seen a winter like that since. During that winter we got a comprehensive picture of the garden and tried to look forward. We had supplied some vegetables to Tom Hildén’s catering business Matglad in the summer of 2018 and wanted to continue with it. We were curious and wanted to try anything and everything. We looked for suitable plants and methods of cultivation. The summer of 2019 showed us in many ways that we had to expand the business if we wanted to continue and had the energy for it. Even though this was cultivation on a relatively small scale, pre-cultivation in spring and delivery of the vegetables wouldn’t work without proper infrastructure, tools and bookkeeping. The work didn’t flow and caused mood swings and losses. One thing was the drought that continued for the second year running. The quality of the products was not up to scratch and the berries were not growing as they should.
We built a place for washing vegetables and thought about solutions for other problems in the autumn of 2019. In the cellar we needed to build a room to be able to handle foodstuffs. It had to have running water, a drying cupboard, table space and plenty of storage space. We also needed to buy the appropriate tools and suitable lighting equipment to be able to grow many plants indoors. We drew up a large map of the whole area and discussed it with Matglad. The emphasis then moved towards root crops, specialist salads and edible flowers which was something new for us. Late that autumn we sowed a large area with seeds suitable for autumn sowing. A dream of sowing beds started to come to life but we still hadn’t covered the problem of mulching. The soil was still bare when winter 2019-2020 started.
But the winter never really came, just a long autumn. In December we decided to buy proper cultivation tables, seed boxes and lamps. We also decided to try our hand at greenhouse cultivation in a poly-tunnel. We ordered a poly-tunnel measuring 3 by 6 meters and started sowing our own Chili pepper plants. We were raring to go. A new idea was to build a hexagon shaped tower with pallet collars to be planted with different plants for herbal infusions that we wanted to try out. The idea was to get to know the different plants and find out which were most aesthetically pleasing. During the spring we planted 15 different types of plants in the “tea-tower”.
The biggest change happened in our heads. During the winter we got hold of Philipp Weiss and Annevi Sjöbergs SKOGSTRÄDGÅRDEN: odla ätbart överallt (The forest garden – grow food everywhere). It was published in 2018 and was voted gardening book of the year in Sweden. The idea of a forest garden working according to the principles of nature and harnessing the structure of the deciduous forest. In other words the unity of annuals and perennials, trees, shrubs and herbs that are self-sufficient regarding water and nutrients, the idea blew our minds. Together with mulching and Bokashi’s literal SOIL CULTIVATION we started a journey into a new world.
We were in a strong mind to do everything better and grow first class produce. There were lots of questions that could only be answered by trying them out. One such question was the drying of herbs for herbal infusions: growing, drying, planning mixes and packaging. There were no short cuts so we gathered together lots of candidates and tested small amounts. Another big project was the selection of leafy greens that catering firms liked to use to give their customers something new and different. Rocket, Chinese mustard and other types of Asian cabbage succeeded well, were possible to grow and tasted good.
We also planned the choice of edible flowers which we had succeeded in growing and had a good experience of. The flowers were the summer’s loveliest products and a large box of edible flowers topped off our weekly delivery of vegetables.
We had started clearing the newest planting area in the autumn but we were only half way. It had been an old strawberry patch many years earlier and was still there. Clearing the field was hard work and we would not have managed it without the help of landscaper Bobben Adolfsson. Tree stumps and plastic were removed with the help of a mechanical digger. The soil was good but mugwort and wild parsnip, a pest here in Parainen, had taken over.
2020
The winter stayed exceptionally mild if you could call it winter. It was so mild in fact, that the blueberry honeysuckle started to flower too early. The spring, in May was cold and freezing. No pollinators were to be seen which didn’t help the already suffering berry bushes. The biggest disappointment was that the autumn sowing had failed miserably. High temperatures and the moisture had damaged the seeds and the well thought out plan had literally gone rotten. I tried, in the spring, to sow something new in the beds but that didn’t work either. I started to think that there must be something wrong with the soil. We looked for the cause and searched for a solution in the literature and tried contacting gardening experts.
After two very dry summers we had decided to invest in a watering system and an artesian well. First, we had considered collecting rainwater and even by leading water from an old open-cast mine but these alternatives were neither possible nor enough. It’s OK to collect rainwater if it rains now and then but during the summers of 2018-2019 it hardly rained at all. All the forecasts point in the same direction with extreme weather and long droughts and torrential rain that dry soil can’t take.
The water from the new well is, of course, too cold to be used as such. We needed to develop a system whereby the cold well water could be warmed up and oxygenated and then transported to different locations. You need to water different plants at different times without waste. The Sauvo company Järvenkylä helped with the planning and delivery of the system. Pipes where buried under the ground, hosepipes and 2000 metres of drip irrigation piping were laid together with a lot of connectors. A big job and one that will continue in 2021.
Now we needed to try greenhouses. Our first one was the 200 € poly-tunnel the experience of which was mostly positive. We grew and harvested tomatoes, basil and chili. The watering worked fine but
the ventilation was a problem. Most of the summer the doors at either end were kept open.
The third theme for the year was edible flowers and we experienced both the good and the bad. Some varieties survived well and were usable while others tasted strange and had a dry consistency. The humble pot marigold was definitely the best as it gave a good harvest, tasted great and was beautiful. It also works well as protection against bugs. Another popular flower was the Nasturtium and we must grow more of them. Pumpkin flowers are a delicacy and, in a large bunch, smell delightful.
The biggest setback was yet to come. While walking in the garden one late summer evening I noticed that the gooseberry bushes looked strange. We had three different kinds of gooseberries in two long rows and now they were covered in larvae of the common gooseberry sawfly having a good time eating everything. I hadn’t been paying attention and in a very short time all the leaves had been eaten. We asked the experts again and received answers like: soapy water, sulphur in the autumn, spheciformes or parasites that live on the sawfly. Many said that nature would balance things out in the end or that we should try and improve the gooseberries own resilience. There were too many caterpillars and bushes to manually remove them. They eat the bushes bare three times that summer.
It was difficult to keep calm with all this happening.
I’ll try to improve the condition of the soil and the bushes’ resilience for one more year and if that doesn’t help then I’ll dig up all the bushes in the autumn (2021) and try something else. Perhaps these varieties were just not suitable for our climate.
The harvest for 2020 was partly very good. We have learnt a lot about different leafy greens and managed to prolong the growing season at both ends. Otherwise we seemed to manage most of the bugs except those damned sawfly. We progressed well with after harvest handling, packaging and delivery. We purchased official scales and we were gained an official certificate for the handling of foodstuffs. Together with our customers we have learnt new things about different vegetables and their use in the kitchen. Several new varieties are worth working hard for while others can be forgotten. We have learnt and realised that we don’t know enough yet and that the challenges are enormous.
We held a small party in the summer during the strange Corona crisis, it was on St. Olofs day at the end of July. About 70 guest came to look at the garden, taste some of our herbal infusions and to listen to The Fifth Jazz Edition’s concert. We received many comment and ideas as well as a practise run of how Tallbacka could work as a garden to visit. One evening in August a group of Archipelago Guides came to visit. Their feedback from the visit helped us to understand how the garden could be presented and was worth its weight in gold. They know what they are talking about. Something even stranger happened at the beginning of August, a visit from national TV. The programme Närmat I Åboland (Local food in Åboland) included us in their show. The chef Micke Björklund and TV anchor Mathias Jungar came and prepared some food from the garden and we sat down and eat it. We had just 10 minutes warning before they came and without any planning we tried to keep up. Huh huh – oh dear!
Autumns big drive was to put together a new greenhouse. It was positioned in a place where there was enough room and light, level ground and where the soil was in need of rejuvenation. The earth here was a lifeless, compacted mineral soil with very little humus and no capacity to hold water. Many attempts at sowing seeds had not succeeded except for chives but even that didn’t grow very well. We removed 40 cm of soil and part was returned after mixing it with compost, woodchips and horse manure. Everything was then watered with an EM solution. They say that soil microbes are very important for how plants germinate, grow and produce the harvest and also how resilience against diseases and bugs is increased.
We spent the whole autumn constructing the greenhouse. At the same time we planned for a “soil factory” and a Bokashi compost. We will have time to test early veg and plant propagation in the new polycarbonate-glazed greenhouse during the spring of 2021.
Four years of setbacks and climate disasters have softened me to speak openly of the advantages of mulching. We need to mulch more and to a system, save water and protect the plants from dehydration, fertilize using natural methods and prevent soil erosion. We need to provide ideal conditions for the microbes in the soil so that they can continue with their important work of breaking down components of the soil and create a strong soil and resilient plant varieties. This is our greatest challenge: to cultivate and look after the soil and to give it the means to regenerate itself. In this way we can believe in a better future despite the setbacks
2021
WE STARTED OUR Facebook page and had a good start with our homepage during the winter of 2021. Lots of important things where new to us and we were looking for direction. The greenhouse, plug sowing, schooling out plants, NO-DIG beds, beds made directly on grass, bokashi, soil factories, the list goes on and on. In January, a large map of the garden was completed and was great help with the ordering of seeds and equipment. We learnt more and more about the NO-DIG method during the spring especially about plug sowing and how to harvest and how to lengthen the harvesting season. We started to aim for two harvests during the same growing season and gained valuable experience with different cultivars.
We learnt a lot from our mistakes, the most bitter was the complete devastation a crop of peas. The cultivar was one of the best, Carouby de Mausanne, for which we had built fine, rustic looking supports. But we had sown too late, the pre-summer weather was inclement and the spot we had chosen was probably not the best. The peas didn’t grow and picked up some fungal disease or other and on top of that they tasted awful. The day we pulled out row after row of growth was a sad day indeed. I thought that this would be the last time I grew peas.
The spring was a time off urgency and tiredness. After changing jobs I only had a few days off work for summer holidays. Nalle built two eco-toalets for garden visitors. During early June we were visited by our local horticultural society (Aura Trädgårdsvänner) and for the first time we participated in Open Gardens were for one day a year people open up their gardens to the public. Both events caused worries and stress. At the same time we experienced an invasion of greenfly. The fruit trees were drowning in them and the garden wasn’t in the condition it should have been in.
The “Year of the Pumpkin” project was, however, a great success where the long beds worked well and the clover covering kept down the weeds effectively with the black plastic covering working
well in April and May before planting. Any weeds died quickly due to lack of light. I was apprehensive about the eventual negative effects of the sawdust and lack of nitrogen due to composting but the problem soon proved to be not that big. Watering a few times with the Ema-solution helped the plants to survive the worst. All in all we had 16 different types of pumpkins. They all reached harvest but a few will not be grown again. The best of the bunch were the snake-like Tromboncino, also known as Zucchetta, the tasty and durable Delicata Zeppelin and the Guatemalan Blue ‘Banana’ squash. We’ll grow these in 2022 as well. The best zucchini was Costata Romanesca and the green Black Beauty. The early first frosts of autumn killed of the zucchini first and a week later the winter squash. We would probably have had a more durable harvest if they could have grown a few weeks more.
The heatwave and drought in July racked the summer growth with the temperature staying close to 30ºC for a very long time with no rain. Growth stopped, the plants suffered and the season was cut short in the middle. We watered as much as we dared but this could never replace real rain. The temperature in the greenhouse was of course way over the optimal and it was to hot to even be inside in the middle of the day. The tomatoes stayed ‘just’ alive and that’s about all I can say about them. The chilli seemed OK but only started to produce fruits when the worst of the heat was over. This didn’t leave much time for the fruits to mature so the harvest was rather poor.
We put a lot of effort into cabbage growing with varying results. Growing the plants from seed was easy and when these were planted we protected them from the cold and the bugs with fleece tunnels and planting with Tagetes. We had high hopes for the cone cabbage, two green varieties and the red Kalibos cone cabbage. We also tried new varieties such as broccolini, kailan (Chinese broccoli) and some Brussels sprouts and broccoli. Amazingly, we had very little
trouble with bugs as the plants grew in the fleece tunnels but the tunnels became our biggest problem when the heatwave hit in July. The fleece made it far too hot for the cabbages and with no air circulation the growth was retarded.
In 2020 we gave a lot of thought to the care of our berry bushes and fruit trees and soil improvement so in the autumn of 2021 we invested in 58 m³ of woodchips, mostly silver birch. The aim was to give new life to the bushes and trees by improving the soil around their roots. In other words by suffocating the weeds and feeding the microbes. We treated nearly all the bushes and trees and eager permaculture students from Tuorla did the work in a couple of days, spreading tens of cubic meters of woodchips, compost and horse manure. Firstly, they covered the soil around the base of the bushes and trees with newspapers and cardboard. In the truffle garden they did not use compost, only newspaper and then woodchips and lime as recommended by Lasse Ingmans instructions.
I am very pleased with the expanded flower- and vegetable beds we made in the spring and the completely new NO-DIG beds. The most perfect new bed was placed between the blackcurrant row and the orchard. It’s called the ‘special salad bed’. The grass was first covered with newspapers and cardboard and secondly about 15 cm of compost and soil. Then we planted the bed with among other things buck’s-horn plantain, hollyhocks, orache, good king henry, French sorrel, Tuscan kale, Malabar spinach, perilla, hearts-ease and many tagetes. The bed was very productive and looked good a long way through the autumn, even though we didn’t really make the most of all the possibilities available to us. It was a good start to a garden tour as it was a concrete example of many important things for us: the NO-DIG method of bed-building and the essence of permaculture ideas of growing trees, bushes, vegetables and flowers together. In the bed we could also show off old forgotten salad varieties with modern ones.
2022
We started the year with an analysis of the situation and a new plan. The texts for the home page and the list of plants were updated in January. We also made a new presentation folder to inform our customers about our new salad mix, Tallbacka Mix and what it contains. At the end of January we succumbed to the corona virus, luckily a milder strain. At the beginning of February the new books we had ordered arrived by post, Charles Dowding’s Skills and Stephen Barstow’s Around The World in 80 Plants. Both books were a great reading experience and have left ‘tracks’ in the garden. The precision cultivation method of Dowding’s and Barstow’s incredibly species rich list of eatable plants (lettuce/salad) gave our own product a fantastic base and is something new and unique in Finland.
We made no new growing map for 2022, but we wanted to build some new NO DIG beds and knew that we needed to cut down some old apple trees that were in bad shape. We carefully started to sow and raise our plants. On the first day of February we sowed chilli and at the beginning of March we moved the lettuces to the greenhouse. The spring was very cold, long and icy and in the middle of March we had a thick layer of ice everywhere with frozen ground underneath. The greenhouse was surrounded by snow-melt and the start of the growing season was definitely late.
The beginning of March saw us collecting brushwood and branches to turn them into chippings so we could build our first Berkeley Hot Compost. Our attempts with composts from the year before were not enough for our needs and the long, drawn out spring showed us the churlishness of the soil: the composts were frozen solid. The NO DIG method of cultivation needed large amounts of compost and quickly! The Berkeley method of composting, from the University of Berkeley, promised a finished compost within a month sounded like such a crazy idea that we just had to try it. We collected horse manure as a “green” material and a “brown” material consisting of wood-chippings and garden refuse and placed them in layers in 1.2 x 1.2 metre pallet collars. After the fifth day they should be turned with a fork bringing the inner material to the edges and vice-versa.
Thanks to the pallet collars the work was not as strenuous as anticipated and the method worked better than we had ever hoped! We soon had four composts, then six…
The soil we needed for plant propagation was another problem for 2022. We had no compost of our own for this yet and we were forced to buy the soil. Perhaps it was just bad luck but some of the sowing didn’t germinate at all, while some that germinated even died. This happened to our beetroot and Swiss chard plants. With the coming season of 2023 we are better equipped; we started a compost in the greenhouse in the autumn with the thought of making soil. We hoped to save some money on soil and considering its apparent varying quality is relatively expensive. We also heard bad news from Sweden who had warned of traces of pyralids in soils and manures. It has been very quiet about these substances in Finland. The ice and snow had almost melted towards the end of April but the ground was still frozen. At the beginning of May a group of students from Tuorla came to acquaint themselves with our cultivation methods so we were able to get the work moving. We measured out the new beds for herbs, rhubarb and flowers in the apple garden.
The study group then built the NO DIG beds by covering the ground with cardboard and newspaper, hose manure and soil.. The final result was surprisingly good despite the cold spring. The beds needed to be watered well a few times during the summer months but as the plants rooted themselves well in the soil and the weeds under the cardboard died as a result of lack of light, the plants developed quickly in the undisturbed, microbe rich soil structure. The sage and rhubarb grew really well and we planted some new blackcurrant bushes Rovada and Viksnes and cherry plums Pietarin Lahja, Inese and Sapalta in the beds. This next spring we’ll see how they get through their first winter.
In April we harvested our first lettuce and the outdoor season started May 3rd when we sowed radishes and onions. In other words it wasn’t early but the spring was cold. The radishes grew well under the fleece, but they didn’t do well enough in the conditions to be able to harvest them and replant lettuces. We were expecting our top harvest to begin around midsummer. We managed to get some salad for the midsummer celebrations but the top harvest started at the beginning of July.
The way Dowding grows salads is ingenious: he sows in boxes outside, plants the small plants on separately in their own plugs and lets them grow in the greenhouse and if necessary covers them with fleece to spare them from the cold. This saves unnecessary work and also space which is especially important for us. A couple of times a week we harvest one plant at a time by taking the outermost leaves from the stem. This allows the undisturbed growing tip to quickly produce new, perfect leaves. We are dreaming of a winter greenhouse for growing lettuces, but we haven’t got that yet. Still, the first phases of the work ought to go smoothly. We need to plan things well in advance, the varieties we sow, the growing lights, sheet pots and planting on in beds that have a couple of inches of compost. And of course we need a whole lot of luck. We try to learn from our mistakes and then try again.
Growth in June was enormous and everything looked great under the early summer light. In July we had a lot of lettuce. Tallbacka Mix is constantly challenging us, teaching us and gives us a lot of happiness. Under the summer light the lettuces look as beautiful as jewels.
Everything looked promising on June 5th when we celebrated the garden opening for Whitsun. We talked a lot about the preceding five years, new ideas, the NO DIG method, the composts, the extra plants that were for sale as well as Tallbacka honey (Titti Edfelt), Erik Saanila’s pictures and posters, Robert’s Bröd’s rolls and the house band, The Fifth Jazz Edition performed. A great day!
Many things can be made to fit into the season. Some things turn out well, others not. We got more automatic ventilators for the greenhouse and after the last years scalding weather we bought a net for shading. The tomatoes and aubergines grew well in the greenhouse but the aubergines didn’t want to fruit. We were forced to accept it. 2022 was the year of the tomato. This year we will radically decrease the amount of tomatoes and chilli and grow rocket and Chines mustard in the greenhouse. Unfortunately the bugs are stronger than us outdoors where a tightly woven protecting cloth or a late sowing don’t seem to help.
The soil quality has improved and is already showing what it can do, but cultivation mistakes and the droughts of previous summers has affected the perennials and it shows. The berry bushes have begun to get better but the gooseberry moths are still with us (not so common in UK). We have not wanted to sell the berries until we can get the moth under control as much as possible. Spring 2023 we will start pruning the bushes so as to increase available compost material as much as possible. We believe in our lovely berries and we wouldn’t manage throughout the long, dark winters without our berry breakfasts. Our list of rare berry plants has become longer and new for the autumn were the Cornelian cherries Olena and Dublany, mahonia, medlar Nottingham, mulberry and juneberry Härkätien Herkku. We will be selling them in time and not just using them ourselves.
Delivering to our customers can take a long time. Harvest and preparation for sale will take most of our time on a Sunday and Monday. During the short summer season extra deliveries before the weekends are needed as well; the archipelago can be filled with many events so work in the garden is always threatened and that’s why we believe in the NO DIG method. We can leave time consuming tasks like weeding, digging over beds and fertilizing., providing we have done the ground work properly, of course. Ideally, we would have had time to spread a layer of compost on all the beds late in the autumn and also spread wood-chippings between the beds. In effect, the NO DIG beds are ready for sowing or planting the day after harvesting and a light raking of the surface. Watering is made easy because the soil, being undisturbed, where the microbial and fungal (the hypha) structure is still intact, keeps a hold on the water and uses it effectively. It is, however, important to pay attention to the edges of beds during the summer. Greedy grasses wants to spread into the beds and slugs and snails love the damp and protected edges where they spend the day waiting for the nightly food orgies. Well looked after edges and paths are also important for the look of the garden. We want people to visit our garden all through the season so we like to keep the edges well looked after. The challenge for us is to use the little time and energy we have in the right way. How can we divide them between cultivation, customer deliveries and garden aesthetics and still manage to realise the whole.
Last year we didn’t have enough compost to cover the new beds and the areas under bushes. As well as the Berkeley composts, we built a permanent, roofed, 3 x 1.5 metre three-sectioned compost from Charles Dowding’s example. It works by filling one section at a time and continuing until it reaches 1.7 metres in height and no longer sinks down. It’s interesting to follow how the heat develops and every time you add new material and it reaches 55 – 60°C you can be happy. It’s important to check the dampness now and then and water when necessary.
The first section can be left to its own devices for a few months, during which the third section is filled. The middle section works as a store for the “brown” material with a high carbon content and later the first section is turned into it. Dowding’s compost is turned only once and after two or three months it’s ready to use.
We can collect as much “green” material as we like from the garden, which contains nitrogen, but it’s more difficult to find material with carbon content. It’s the other way round in the spring. We were already preparing for the next summer in the autumn by having a lorry load of autumn leaves delivered from the graveyard in Åbo. Many helpful gardeners have also provided us with leaves and garden waste. We are always on the look out for suitable material and others waste is a gold mine for our composts. We need about 10 m³ of compost every year to keep the NO DIG beds going. In the beginning we probably need more and that is definitely a challenge. However, making compost is inspiring! It is so overwhelming and addictive that other garden duties suffer.
As the Corona pandemic started to subside during 2022 we started to open the garden for visits. This has been our aim for the last two years. We have also participated twice in the Open Gardens scheme and in 2022 this was on August 7th. The day took quite an effort but we also learnt a lot and it was a necessary achievement for us. We had five hours of continuous garden guiding, quite a job. On July 31st we had an Onions and Lyrics evening with onions and other delicacies in the garden with a program of lyrics and also tasty food supplied by Eva Matmalmen.
Other groups have visited us during the growing season. It has been inspirational to present and guide in the garden but also quite exacting. Even though we can talk about the garden “until the cows come home” we must be careful to present it clearly and interestingly. This is the direction we need to develop it in. So next season we would like to welcome all who are interested in gardening, soil, vegetables and the NO DIG method. Tallbacka is open the whole summer and we can cater for groups at short notice. (We need some time to prepare the food)
In September we participated in a new activity. Kimmo Englund from Vantaa (near. Helsinki) knows a lot about the life of microbes in soil and soil structure. We were lucky to be the first to host a course on soil with Kimmo lecturing and giving us practical advice and introducing us to the wonderful life of soil. We received new knowledge and were eager to try out methods of cultivation that and are both useful for, and benefit, the soil’s microbes. It would be good if we could have more similar courses; this is an important subject and has, unfortunately, been lost in modern agriculture.
We were invited in October 2022 to lecture on NO DIG and how we have applied it to our situation in Finland and Pargas. Outi went to the Livia trade school and Nalle went to one of Aura trädgårdvänner’s monthly meetings in Åbo. All in all, it was a positive experience because while the lecture was being planned it made us think clearly about the subject and hopefully lead us to new insights. It’s also good to meet new people who are interested in permaculture and growing things as nature intended.
Our strength began to run out during the autumn. There was just too much to do and the daylight was getting shorter, the mornings colder. It became immediately colder when the sun went behind the clouds. We made compost as long as it was possible. We extended our long project, a wooded area between the road and garden. The ditch has been fitted with drainage pipes and filled in with gravel and other garden waste. Grass and other growth is covered with cardboard. We received a damaged bale of hay which provided many square metres of cover. We then covered this with horse manure and finally lots of leaves. We are thinking of planting small fruit trees and perennial herbs. The Cornelian cherries are already planted on this warm bank.
We have now gained access to a small plot (ca 600 m²) adjoining our plot by the main road. We are dreaming of a small pond with frogs and toads and suitable perennials like Iris. Only the future will tell how it will shape up.
This next year will bring new things and shapes. Tallbacka Mix will be our main product and it will be full of new things, very beautiful and taste wonderful. We will still develop the garden, the bushes will grow and the truffle grove is starting to take shape. The berries will produce well. You can sit by the herb beds and enjoy the beauty of their flowers and the buzzing insects or be assured of the wonder of life growing and being supported with the compost.
2023
The year 2023 has been marked by worries and fears. The pandemic retreated but remained in the background and war filled the news. For our part, we have tried to stay on the side of the good and continue a meaningful life. That meaning is to be found in the garden.
In the garden we are still not protected from money worries, diseases and fatigue. We decided to focus on NO-DIG cultivation in the garden and it takes time to learn something new and consolidate the new method. We have also decided to make everything public and have opened the garden for visitors even though it is not finished and we do not know everything. We take a conscious risk that you need to do with something new that deviates from the usual. Sometimes it hurts, but usually love of everything that grows was the greatest of our emotions. We have decided to continue.
No Dig composting 2023 was the second year we applied NO DIG composting. By then, we had already gained experience of different composting methods, the required materials, the amount of work and, above all, how much compost is needed. Tallbacka’s compost manager Outi took the matter very seriously and decided to use the bulk of her energies producing compost so as to have enough compost for the growing beds. We had also had some unfortunate experiences. For example, the soil factory with bokashi compost that we had started with great expectations was a bitter disappointment. The bokashi process was unsuccessful and our own idea of putting bokashi compost and soil in different layers did not work. The end result was a compost mixture with a rock-hard surface and dense weed growth. Our ordinary composts were too wet and froze in the winter, resulting in the whole process taking too long. The Berkeley Hot Compost method, on the other hand, was promising. Wood chippings, garden waste, horse manure, leaves and coffee grounds were available. How much compost is it possible to produce in a season? We decided to try and find out. The winter proper did not come until March, so there was snow well into April. On April 10th, the first two composts made of pallet collars (1.2 x 1.2 x 1m) high) were full. The Berkeley compost should be turned from the fifth day every other day until the material has changed to even, but still coarse, compost soil. The worms also work hard after the initial heat of the process subsides. The most difficult part of the process is to keep the moisture at a suitable level; during the summer the composts wanted to dry even though we covered them with a tarpaulin to minimize evaporation.
After the first two, we made several more. In the end there were a total of about 20 of which some were joined during the final process. In June we also started collecting regular garden composts the solid composts we built using Dowding’s model. We can state that after working all summer we got a substantial stock of good quality compost spread on almost all the growing beds in the autumn. It was satisfying to have the compost spread out as cover material before winter. The compost has time to settle, worms and other microbes can begin their decomposing work and in spring when the snow has melted the soil is ready for planting. The compost is not manure and it does not dissolve in rain or snow. The soil improves as the micro-organisms multiply.
For many reasons, the compost cover is second to none for soil health. Drought seems to be a recurring problem for spring and early summer. A soil that is covered with compost tolerates drought much better, the soil micro-life and fungal hyphae form a structure that effectively binds water. We are convinced that the wood chippings between the growing beds is an excellent way to reduce evaporation and increase the number of fungal hyphae. It is possible to walk on the NO DIG beds, the ground becomes resilient and is not compacted. The rainwater is absorbed into the soil more efficiently, partly because of the worms. There is no need for fertilizers and no need to worry about pH values or lack of trace elements. A living soil balances itself and the microorganisms have their own ways of releasing molecules for plants to use. We humans don’t understand all these subtleties, but fortunately we don’t have to either! It is enough for us to provide food and favourable living conditions, then they will do the work for us.
Salad Mix-promising introduction and an easy adjustment.
The salad mix that we developed in 2022 is an excellent product. It varies according to the season, consists of many tasty salad plants, is fabulously beautiful and full of surprises! It was clear, however, that the development work needed to be continued. Some of the varieties did not yield enough, other varieties tested were not durable enough or were plagued by pests and some tasted too strange. But lettuce, leaf lettuce, spinach, garland chrysanthemum and buck’s-horn plantain worked nicely and the variety of lettuce varieties made the mix wonderfully beautiful and colorful.
In the spring we got the strangest growing experiences and surprises when we tried to investigate germination problems in salads. The final cause was never clarified, but the salad seeds germinated poorly. We dismissed the obvious causes: temperature too high, high humidity or drought. We tried different soil mixtures, shop-bought and our own. Maybe the seeds were bad or the moon phase was wrong or something else. The planned selection of varieties and their early introduction went awry and we were could only grow what germinated. After that experience, we can’t boast of our skill at pushing up seedlings. Every healthy plant is a wonder and a joy.
We got a new variety for the salad mix. A fascinating novelty, although only tasting a small bit, were the sour leaves of mountain sorrel. Garden sorrel gives a big and tasty harvest but does not fit into the salad mix as the snails eat holes in it, the shield-leaf sorrel again is beautiful and tasty but hopelessly slow to harvest. Mountain sorrel is very tasty and easier to use. Last year’s small test area will be expanded.
The salad mix needs flavours and character from salad mustards and rocket so this coming summer we will grow them in the greenhouse. Outdoors, unfortunately, it does not do well – flea beetles eat the leaves completely or fill them with holes. The drought of early summer favours flea beetles and covering with fleece doesn’t help.
The salad growing technique we learned from Charles Dowding is excellent and have admired it many times. The plants are grown individually and they are planted at a distance of about 20 cm from each other. The harvest is collected from the older outer leaves, which allows the plant to produce a new fresh harvest for one and a half months. Finally the plant begins to go to flower and the leaves become woody and bitter. A continuous plant production is important so you can get a new harvest without breaks. Last summer we discovered that it is important to harvest all the time. Only in this way can quality be maintained. It may be wise to harvest even if there is no buyer for the product – the older leaves use the plant’s energy resources unnecessarily and also attract snails. (This is, of course, a frustrating way to make compost!) In the coming season we will work to have a more even harvest time so that the plants can produce a harvest for as long as possible.
The visitor garden 2023
Openness is one of Tallbacka’s main ideas. We welcome guests throughout the season.
Gradually, we have created an infrastructure and a functional system to be able to welcome a bus full of guests and introduce them to our NO DIG garden. You need information boards, a good road and a wide road junction (renewed in the spring of 2023), with a turning point for the bus, a sufficient number of seats for an initial presentation and a roof in case of rain, a nice eco-loo and the possibility to wash your hands, a fully planned guide route, some snacks to offer and also something to sell. Of course, this increases the workload when there is already enough, but things are gradually becoming routine. And it is definitely worth the trouble! Although it is always exciting when guests arrive and we get tired out, the fatigue is quickly forgotten. It is a pleasure to talk about the garden to people who are interested to listen about, and curious to see, what we grow. Soil improvement is also fascinating for others and almost addictive. It’s great to meet people who share the love of everything that grows.
We have continued to develop the visitor garden in 2023 and have plans for the current year. We want the richness of species to be great; on the website we have a cultivation list, which includes more than 500 species and varieties. We are always very interested in new plants and presenting the forgotten traditional plants that are worth keeping in cultivation. We try to create small units, thematic islands, plant groups with a story. Part of this work consists of taking care of the edging of the borders and weed removal, but also the great ideas that arise when you see what “should” grow in a place and how the edge of the growing bed “should” curve! Some plants finds their place and thrive excellently, next to another plant – and so the story goes on. We have named almost all such places with their own names, which is an important part of Tallbacka’s story.
PLANTGREENHOUSE
Ever since 2018, we have had a dream of a greenhouse with the ability to have delicate fruit trees in the garden such as apricot, peach and fig.
The blueprints for a winter greenhouse were approved in 2020, so the last opportunity for us was to start in the autumn of 2023. However, the estimated cost showed that it was not possible to build a winter greenhouse, so we slimmed down the plans to a plastic greenhouse. But we needed to begin in the spring of 2023 by removing the growing boxes that were from 2016. It turned out that the pallet collars closest to the ground had partially rotted, so they would have been replaced anyway. We took the soil and put it in a pile while we waited for construction to start.
In August we started to excavate the construction site and the area which was about 9 x 11 m. According to the plans the building itself was 4.60x 8 m with a ceiling height of 4.30. The surface was levelled with a gravel covering water pipes, electric cables and sewage pipes. The water and electricity connection was taken from the basement of the house. The foundation was laid with the ground anchors drilled into the ground. A wooden frame was fastened on them to which the roof trusses including wall beams were screwed. The inner ceiling beams were screwed to the ceiling trusses and both gables were given standing struts. (see picture and drawing).
The greenhouse plastic was applied towards the end of October. On October 20th the plastic was fixed with the help of aluminium strips on roof trusses and gable beams. The openings on the ventilation hatches in the roof were fixed and so we had to stop the work due to winter and cold weather. The hatches were delivered in November but are now waiting for better weather conditions.
In December the electricity was run to the greenhouse, but we did not have time to install the lighting. The boards for the protection of the handling of the plant and plugboards were screwed in as well as the boards for the sinks.
The doors on each side, as well as the ventilation hatches, will have to wait to be installed next year.
New vitality for berries and fruits
It has been 6 years since most of our berry bushes and fruit trees were planted. The exceptionally severe drought in 2018 and 2019 caused problems and in some cases certainly caused many of the difficulties we have encountered. They made us look for a solution to the problems and eventually change the cultivation method. The soil does not recover immediately and the plants may never fully recover, but what’s done is done; We also didn’t want to dig everything up and start all over again. The mistakes annoyed us, but that won’t help us to move on. I have previously written about mulching and the gooseberry sawfly. Cherry trees and sweet rowans died during the icy winter of 2021-2022. The raspberries no longer yielded a proper harvest so we decided to remove them. The currant bushes are plagued with the currant moth, which took a large part of the harvest and made the harvest labour intensive. We have harvested berries for our own use and filled our freezers, but only a fraction of the potential harvest, and the quality has not always been the best. Something must be done about the situation!
Michael Phillips ”The Holistic Orchard”
When we were looking for methods to help the berry bushes and fruit trees that were already planted, we found the huge book of the American Michael Phillips about holistic orchard cultivation. The book is unique in terms of the amount of text but also in terms of its content. Phillips strives for naturalness and health in all areas; the health of the soil, the health of the grower and the functioning of the ecosystem as a whole. In addition to being large and beautiful, Phillips’ orchard apples are also superior in nutritional content. All measures, which he deals with in his garden, are aimed at the well-being of fruit trees, which means pests and diseases do not cause great damage. I must immediately clarify that the appearance of his garden does not correspond to the established ideals and the surroundings do not look like a golf course!
From the book we immediately applied some practical methods. When we remove the bush wood, we get wood chips, which are beneficial for fruit trees and berry bushes. As it decays, the soil in the garden is favoured by fungi and microorganisms. We compost the wood chips and also use them as covering material for the paths between the beds. We don’t cut the dandelion flowers because the pollinators need them. Around the fruit trees we plant comfrey, which is an excellent accelerator plant with its deep tap roots that produce a large mass of leaves during the season and release large amounts of minerals, as they decay, to the fruit trees. Comfrey has time to produce several leaf harvests and flowers during a season. We started to make a mixture of neem oil, EM microbes and algae powder and spray the solution onto the vegetation. Phillips also adds fish oil to the mixture, but we have not been able to find such oil in Finland. In 2023, we carried out the treatment twice, at the budding at the beginning of the season and at the beginning of flowering. Phillips does the treatment four times and closely follows the development of the tree. He is constantly aware of when the pests appear and develop and can limit the actions to the right time. He particularly emphasises the importance of thinning the apples before they ripen. We have a lot to learn! The main concerns are sawfly damage on berry bushes and fungal infestation on plums. We intend to continue and learn more and hopefully we will eventually get a better balance in the orchard. Our resources and time still do not allow for such accuracy as Phillips’ book instructs, but we do what we can.
New round of strawberries and raspberries
For the time being, we have no reason to be satisfied with our strawberry cultivation. The first attempt suffered from the drought and the associated manganese shortage and the well-cultivated soil caused problems with planting. The plants of the second experiment had probably been so badly damaged during transport that they never had the strength to grow properly. The winter killed most of the plants so we lost two seasons without a proper harvest, which was frustrating. When it came to the third attempt, we focused on the seedlings. They are micropropagated in Pargas and raised at Peuraniemi nursery, the varieties are Malwina and Lumotar. The first summer is over and the soil is getting better so we hope for the best.
In 2018, we made 35 meter long hügelbeds on both sides of the newer part of the garden. We grew pumpkins in them the first year and later cabbage, onions and carrots. The southern bed turned out to be too dry for vegetables and as we had removed the old rows of raspberries at the same time, we decided to plant new raspberries in the long bench. We thought of different varieties but chose the Glen Ample variety and some cherry bushes (Porthos, Athos) from Savonlinnan taimisto. In April 2023 we planted 60 raspberry plants and later in the summer we built supports as sturdy as was economically possible. During the autumn we spread old leaves and horse compost over the bed. Berry and fruit growing has been challenging and not easy for us. We didn’t put in as much effort as was required. Our knowledge and experience has not been enough. But we learn all the time. We hope that the measures we have taken will eventually lead to a good end result. So that the Tallbacka Bear on our logo gets its arms full!