Tag: 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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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 Spanishand to Africa by freed African slaves. Today it’s grown in almost all tropical and subtropical as…
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Zucchini
Zucchini work reasonable well here, although I haven’t had anything like the bumper crops we had in Switzerland. Which is partly a good thing, because we can’t get quite as sick of them as we did there. In my garden, the plants always grow big but many flowers stay unpollinated and fall off or the…
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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…
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Tomatoes
Tomatoes, well, surely tomatoes grow like crazy in the Mediterranean!? Yes and No. When I first planted tomatoes in the open vegetable plots in 2022 I was shocked to see them turn completely white on one side with “sunburn”. In 2023 I tried shading them but they still suffered and by August all plants were…
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Calendula
I don’t really like “hot” colors in flowers, like yellow, orange, or red. But there are some I can’t resist. Among them is Calendula officinalis or Marigold – one of my alltime favorites. Marigold thrives in a Mediterranean Garden When we first arrived here I tossed a package of calendula seeds in the vegetable garden and…