Garden tour 1: Our first year growing in North Italy

[@moodster8552]

Greetings from Palm Springs California. Wow, your gardens are great! You seem very passionate about the plants and the results are so inspiring. Keep up the good work and thank you for sharing this with us.🤓

[@erika_katrien]

Thank you so much for your sweet message! Greetings back to you and I hope that you're having a very nice day 😊

[@margaritasanchezgomez3422]

Precioso jardin , buen trabajo 👏👏👏👏💕💕

[@cherylmoss3632]

Lovely to see how your roses came back in all their glory. Many vases can be filled with the hydrangeas and roses.

[@erika_katrien]

Oh the vases certainly are filled with an abundance of gardencolors 🥰 Have a lovely day Cheryl!

[@cherylmoss3632]

@@erika_katrien Yes I can see that. In our family we considered it an "unpardonable sin "if the women didnt have flowers in their gardens and homes. i live in South Africa and one year ..many years ago..we had floods which washed away many precious household goods but I always remember my mother sitting at the window and crying as her precious Dahlia bulbs were washed away.. Enjoy and be grateful for all the beauty you create.

[@chickadeeacres3864]

You have such a wide selection. Zinnias are the best! Try the Cactus giants for nice big and tall flowers. I laughed when you showed a Japanese beetle as a cute insect doing its thing 😂.

[@erika_katrien]

My father in law also laughed at me. But luckily enough they don't invade my garden, so I get to enjoy their presence 😊

[@rominagalotta5966]

Lovely garden! you've done an amazing job. I'll be moving to Italy next year (near Piemonte) and I'm taking notes from you for choosing the plants that work the best! Thank you!

[@erika_katrien]

Oh it warms my heart to read this! Most probably i will film a second garden tour towards the end of the growing season, so than you can follow up with how everything did. If you have any additional questions or if i forgot to mention anything, let me know! :) In which country do you live now (if you feel comfortable to share that here)? Thank you for your comment, and I wish you a lovely day!

[@varinaxoxo4213]

You look like Brigitte Bardot in your beautiful garden very enjoyable vid💖💖💖

[@erika_katrien]

Wow, what a generous compliment! Thank you so much Varina, have a wonderful day :)

[@WravTil]

You are right the garden is very beautiful. It all looks very healthy too, so the soil can't be too bad and you've obviously worked hard and have some good knowledge and advice. Longer term, the important thing is to get a good compost heap established that all your weeds, veg waste, grass and soft cuttings can break down and then used to top dress the soil. If you can get horse manure and leave it to rot down well that is good to. Also grow beans and get a crop rotation going so you don;t encourage soil pests and increase fertility. Like borage comfrey has pretty flowers and leaves too and grows very easily and can be chopped up to make a really good liquid fertiliser (you can do the same with nettles too). For the black fly you can spray with soapy water - it's kind to everything else and won;t kill them 100%, but will slow them down. Good luck !

[@erika_katrien]

Thank you for your kind encouragement and also for taking the time to write down your advice! We do compost our waste: we have a hot compost and a passive compost for the extra grass clippings and weeds that would disturb the balance in the hot compost. Do you think that planting autumn/winter crops could help with the crop rotation? Or is it best to put all vegetables in a different spot in the vegetable garden next year even if there were winter crops between? I don't know how to get my hand on horse manure around here, but I think that I could get goat manure. I wonder if i can also lay the manure over the beds during the winter (my grandma used to do that back in the days), but i don't know if it will warm up the soil too much and activate the bulbs and dormant plants? I indeed read about comfrey, I was going to look into finding some young plants in my moms garden next spring :) For now I have been experimenting with making liquid fertilizer out of rabbit droppings. So far the plants seem to react well, but i like to keep on exploring options. I will definitely try the soapy water! Thank you! Have a lovely day :)

[@storiesfromthecascina]

it looks beautiful! I love the herb / vegetable garden bed that you made 🙂we will also be starting small with growing vegetables. zucchine, pumpkins, some ruccola/lettuce, basil, parsley, maybe a small patch of potatoes. I've never grown tomatoes before so not sure if I want to include those next summer or wait another season.

[@storiesfromthecascina]

ook helemaal fan van de lange rij alliums.

[@erika_katrien]

Thank you, Iris! That sounds like a lot of goodness to look forward to! :) Tomatoes are (in my opinion) fairly easy plants to grow... They do a lot by themselves and are hard to kill. They tend to grow fast so you'll have to tie them up to something that helps them stay upright (an extra little binder about every week) and pinch away their "thieves". but if you just take a few plants i think that they would at maximum add an additional 10 min/ week to the work that you will have with the garden. But of course, follow your gut feeling! I wish you both a lot of luck with the move next week! Have a lovely day :)

[@erika_katrien]

Oh yes, they are slowly reaching the end of their blossom now and they have been blooming for about a month. Very thankful plants in my opinion. They grow easy, basically don't need care apart from some weeding (last summer it was between 32 and 38 degrees here and it didn't rain for two months, the alliums survived without any care) and they keep returning every year! Our bulbs have been planted long before we came to live here, so I don't know which variety we have, though i suspect them to be the variety "His excellency". If you would ever be interested to plant the same ones, here you have some info that might help you finding them: ours bloom in late spring, become about 1m60 in height and the flower-cluster is between 10cm and 15cm in diameter. :)

[@storiesfromthecascina]

@@erika_katrien We'll definitely be adding alliums to our garden as well.