HS Turku’s cultivation box has had a busy summer.
“We’ll seewhat will become of this.”
These words were in HS Turku’s first story about box farming.
We – the editors Linda Laine and Milja Virtanen – we took a cultivation box for ourselves in the spring. It was called Leipäteksti, “Leipisk”, and it was placed in Kupittaanpuisto, near HS Turku’s office.
Like other box farmers from Turku, the city of Turku also provided us with the box and soil. After all, we are from Turku.
We set ourselves a clear goal: we would cultivate useful plants in the box and grow the seedlings from the seed itself. For the first cultivation box thing, we did information acquisition about box cultivation and we did know how to do ours should act.
However, we did not follow the good tips. We didn’t even make plans.
And now we tell you what all went wrong.
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At our house neither had experience growing vegetables or roots.
We chose cucumber, zucchini, watermelon, carrot, peas, dill, coriander, velvet flowers and cornflowers for cultivation. That is, way too many plants in one box.
We justified the large number of plants to ourselves by the fact that most of them die before they get into the box or at the latest in the box.
The project started with a trip to the garden store.
We sow the seeds in April. So I know too soon.
We were pleasantly surprised when green began to emerge from the soil. The plants were allowed to grow from seed to seedling inside our delivery.
The seedlings should have been staked before planting them in the box. We didn’t do it anyway, because we couldn’t figure out where we could take the plants to get used to the outdoors. As one option, we are considering the roof of our office. However, we decided to skip this step. We didn’t even bother to carry the jars home.
The seedlings had a hard time, because, for example, at Easter time there was a considerably long break in watering them due to our work shifts. In addition, the growing conditions at the office were unfavorable: too dark and too warm. Seedlings grew into giants.
We were right about one thing. Not all seedlings made it to the box.
In June the seedlings finally got out.
Before planting the plants, it would be worthwhile to think in advance about which plants to put where and even draw a plan on paper. It is good to make sure that the tall plants do not shade the low ones.
We, on the other hand, planted the plants based on feelings. Because of this, for example, our watermelons don’t get much light at the moment. Carrots are also in trouble.
Cucumbers can be seen in the foreground. They died almost immediately.
In addition to cucumbers, we planted zucchini, watermelon and velvet flower seedlings in the box.
Carrots are planted here. We thought we would thin out later.
We sow some of the seeds – carrots, herbs, peas and chickpeas – directly in the box. We were skeptical about them, but in vain. Those, with the exception of carrots, have perhaps been the most successful.
We could have bought gauze to protect the seedlings. However, we couldn’t find the product we wanted in online stores with just the name harso. We once went to a hypermarket and when we couldn’t find “gauze” right away, we decided to do without.
However, this backfired as our cucumbers died time after time. We went several times to replace the dead cucumbers with live seedlings, but in the end we ran out of seedlings. The last lot luckily survived as the peas grew to shade them.
Our farm has been a sad sight at times.
The early summer heat was too much for some of the seedlings.
One our major gripe is related to watering the crop.
We purposely placed the box as close as possible to a water point in the park to avoid carrying water. Unfortunately, Vesipiste has been operating maybe once during the whole summer.
Fortunately, it has rained.
We have carried irrigation water in a watering can from our office 500 meters away. Sometimes every single weekday.
The cultivation box could be watered diligently during the heat. Before Midsummer, several loads of water were dumped into the box. At Midsummer, the box was not taken care of.
Irrigation water is almost always brought from the office.
Our box has also experienced vandalism, by humans and possibly also by animals.
Once, a crushed pink jar was found in the box.
The harvest has also been taken, because in July our dills mysteriously disappeared. It looked very much like they had been cut off with scissors, but we heard that hares can make a similar mark. Know him.
One day there were plucked dill stalks on the box.
In July, we could no longer remember what we had cultivated in which place. In the picture, we consider which plant is which.
Everyone however, we have not succeeded in killing the plants.
Right now we’re pretty proud of our box – we never thought we’d see such a boom.
Despite all the setbacks and our own laziness, the experience has been fun and we look forward to the harvest. You can already see the beginnings of the zucchini and the pods of the peas.
We’ll see what happens to them.
There are more zucchinis coming.
At the moment, the peas are also blooming.
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