Category: Potager
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Aubergines / Eggplants
As for all “summer vegetables”, aubergines do very well here, provided they are planted in good earth and get enough sunshine and water. I have tried three different varieties since 2022. Two of them bought on the market or in der garden center, one from Italian seeds: They make beautiful plants and their fleshy velvety…
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Chilies and Peppers
Chilies as well as bell peppers love mediterranean climates and, if given good nutritious soil and enough water, will fruit well into November or even until the first frost. Sowing chilies has been fraught with difficulty in my experience. The plants don’t really grow strong and suffer tremendously with each transplanting. In the future I…
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Harvesting Olives
We had three olive trees, two of which had been planted in the half shade between some tall trees and the sunlit side of the house. As a result, they grew at an oblique angle and only on the side facing the light. We sold them in the spring and are hoping they are happy…
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Ipomoea Batatas – Sweet Potatoes
Pretty (though few) flowers and tasty fruit – Ipomoea batatas or Sweet Potato work well here in this Mediterranean garden. The wild form of Ipomoea batatas is native to Central America. It was imported to Asia by the Spanish and to Africa by freed African slaves. Today it’s grown in almost all tropical and subtropical…
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Pears “Clapp’s Favorite”
The rather small old pear tree (half trunk), which had not been pruned for ages, produced only two pears after my first heavy pruning in early 2023. In the spring of 2024 it had developed masses of steeply vertical water shoots, of which I removed about half (the narrowest, most incorrectly and most vertically growing).…
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Melons: Cucumis melo and Citrullus lanata
Mediterranean climate should be good for melons one should think. Alas it is for some but not for others. I had ordered several types of “Dry Farming” melon seeds at Seedshunters.com and tried to grow them in 2023 and 2024. Most did not work out, neither in the old vegetable garden, where they shriveled up…