Spent the day with assorted Væres Venner (Friends of Være) weeding the KVANN (Norwegian Seed Saver) gardens. The good news is that almost all the couch grass has been removed from the world garden (using bastard digging and weeding the few that came up again!)
Weeding finished on the temporary bed that will be expanded to become KVANNs Verdenshage (World garden), a circular bed where the straw is with some 80 edible mostly perennials from around the world planted geographically with the centre representing the North Pole!
KVANN’s plant nursery has a number of trees and shrubs, to be eventually spread around the garden, but a few vegetables too
Quinoa “Stephe” with a number of different broad bean (fava) or bondebønner cultivars
Old Norwegian potatoes
Another group (Marina Bakhtina) are working on an insect friendly garden and a so-called Benje’s Hedge (Benjes hekk) has been erected; see https://giy.ie/archive/growing-a-natural-hedge-without-even-planting-it.html
There’s still plenty of space for other folks and projects!
The Allium garden at Ringve has grown well as have the so-called weeds (mostly very young birch trees!). I spent the afternoon weeding and documenting the right hand (easternmost bed)….now known as the New Hampshire bed (I’m told the two beds resemble a map of Vermont and New Hampshire) (As it looks like the garden will be known as Chicago-hagen due to the fact that the native american name Chicago means onion)!!
This is the link to the last album I made from 31st May: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10156051646095860.1073743203.655215859&type=1&l=cbacd0612e
The collection of old chives (gressløk) plants (from gardens around Norway) and various reference cultivars are almost finished flowering….apart from a couple of Japanese / Far East varieties which are now in bud: Allium schoenoprasum ssp sibiricum (from Hokkaido in Japan) and Allium schoenoprasum var. yezomonticola
A sea of birch seedlings and a lone opium poppy!
One of the gardeners had told me that someone had harvested the green tops of shallots growing in the Renessanse-hagen and wondered if they had taken anything from the onion garden. Right enough I found that one plant, Allium x cornutum “Croatia” had been clipped down…this is a plant similar to walking onion / luftløk but with different parent species!
The first yellow flowering onion is out – Allium moly from the mountains of Spain and Southern France with additional populations in Italy, Austria, Czech Republic, Algeria, and Morocco.
Weeding
I thought I’d lost this onion, the old Norwegian chives (gressløk) from the highest altitude, at the mountain farm belonging to Nina Bakken’s family at Dovre (near Hjerkinn). See also the next two pictures!
The moment I’d sniffed out Allium schoenoprasum “Nina Bakken” on Dovre! Picture by Josan McDermott: As she put it – “No rare antique onion can hide from the expert stealth of celebrity plant-hunter”
Allium schoenoprasum “Nina Bakken” from Dovre
The clipped shallots in the Renaissance garden
Perennial vegetables, Edimentals (plants that are edible and ornamental) and other goings on in The Edible Garden
(As it looks like the garden will be known as Chicago-hagen due to the fact that the native american name Chicago means onion)!!
