Upgrading my garden in July

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Last month, I started gardening, preparing the growing medium, and creating new spaces for my plants. This time, I’ll share this month’s garden upgrades: tidying up the garden, expanding it, and organizing the planting areas using beverage bottles and repurposing old wooden boards I had at home.

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I pruned some plants that were crowding each other, like the papaya tree that was too close to the chili plant. That was quite disruptive and caused the plants to compete for nutrients. So, I decided to trim them back and expand the planting area made from wooden planks.

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In the planting area made from the old planks, I planted small, single-harvest vegetable seedlings. At first, I sowed spinach seeds, but they didn’t seem to want to grow. Perhaps it was because I’d stored the spinach seeds for too long, so they wouldn’t sprout. Since I had some cauliflower seedlings, I tried sowing them yesterday in poly bags.

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As a result, the plants are growing well there; although the growth process takes quite a while, watching these vegetable plants grow and develop is truly amazing. These chili peppers are growing well—the fruits are large and long—even though I didn’t plant them myself; they grew on their own, and then I took care of them and gave them manure.

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The chili peppers that bore fruit yesterday have now started to turn red; unfortunately, they aren’t ripening all at once. So I only harvested 3 of them—it’s kind of funny, but yeah, it’s only natural that I wouldn’t get much from harvesting just one chili plant. Actually, some of my chili plants are in polybags and a few are in these bottles, but for some reason, they aren’t growing at the same pace. My mom said they weren’t spaced out properly when planted, so some of them are growing slowly.

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The good news is that the bird’s eye chili peppers are starting to appear, but this variety seems to be the “devil’s chili,” which is incredibly spicy. I’m happy to be growing these, but I think I’ll have to plant the regular bird’s eye chili peppers that aren’t too spicy later on.

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My tomatoes are also starting to grow big; it looks like I’ll be harvesting them in about a week. I’m quite happy with the progress of my little garden—it’s already looking much better than before. You know, this is my favorite spot at home; I often spend a lot of time here. I’ve also started transplanting the round tomato plants I grew, and they’re thriving in their new beds. It’s very satisfying—it looks like I’ll have plenty of tomatoes next month.

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There are many new plants here. I bought a polybag of celery that was already growing—it was quite cheap, only IDR 5,000, even though the plant was already quite large. I haven’t transplanted it yet; I plan to move it to a larger pot.

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In addition to the plant mentioned above, I’ve also planted some red onions, Water Spinach, and Green mustard. Unfortunately, one of my onion pots died—I think the soil was too damp, so the onion bulbs started to rot.

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As for the Green mustard, it’s taking a while to grow. I’ve been struggling to provide them with natural fertilizer—compost made from kitchen scraps—but I hope they’ll grow well eventually.

That’s a little update on my garden. I hope it rains soon—the garden will feel cooler, and the plants will certainly be happy when the rain comes. As you can see in the photos I took above, they look even more beautiful when captured in the morning after it has rained all night.

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