Yesterday we were very lucky with the weather, Saturday was rain-free and we could plant. On Thursday evening the seedlings were delivered, this was organised by the community itself, very good, there will be many more in the coming months. The home-grown seedlings were strong enough for planting, everything was in place to get the plants in the ground on the agreed day. Many had already prepared their planting plans for their beds, and Zsuzsa came to give advice to all the garden members on planting and positioning the plants. With 34 beds, Zsuzsa had a lot to do, she went to each bed and with the gardener she put the seedlings in the right place, it was like a kind of weird chess where the seedlings are the pieces and the bed is the horseshoe shaped board. Although it’s not chess, it’s more suited to the game of Go.

On the side of the garden around this strip will be the common cultivated areas that we tend to divide up, so the very spreading plants like zucchini or squashes will go here, and then we’ll try to get them to spread up the strip. You can see the pallets in the background, we’ll be using them to build more garden furniture in the near future.

In parallel with the planting, the garden keys were distributed, so now each garden member has their own key and can go to the garden whenever they want.  We have also divided up the common cultivated areas, although this is still a bit ad-hoc, it will be finalised at the next garden meeting. We have also put together the compost bins, but compost education is still to be done, this will be done soon.

Now it’s going to be a week of lousy weather, with rain and overcast skies, I’m a bit worried about how the plants will cope.

The more important tasks for the coming period will be to build pallet furniture, figure out the garden sign, the sponsor sign and the garden visitor’s garden sign. Now at the planting day many people came in and looked around asking questions, we need a Visitors Rules sign. Soon the sun sails will be put up in the garden, we need them very much because in summer we need shade over the sandpit and the community area, the garden is very wet, it gets hot as hell in the summer heat.

We still need to buy some hoses for the garden, maybe some basins under the taps, and one of the garden members promised a tarpaulin for the sandpit, so the local cats have already found the garden.

We will be planting a lot more: there will be a flower area by the entrance and other places. What we need to work on a lot is the grating, where we plan to put a flower meadow to cover the sloping walls reinforced with jute netting. In any case I have sprinkled sunflower and ornamental sunflower seeds, if they survive and sprout they will make a pretty picture.

It was the first real gardening day, we’ve made a lot of progress, but it’s still the beginning, there’s a lot to do.