It's the 21st of march and spring has officially begun. The days are getting longer and the sun shows up regularly again here in The Netherlands.
The warmer temperatures and sunny days make it appealing to go into the garden, which I've been doing.

Last weekend I had been doing some pruning of my raspberry and some other bushes that have grown a bit big and and do some hoeing to get rid of the weeds that didn't mind it was winter.

Signs of spring

That spring was arriving was already showing by the beautiful blossom in our backyard. The first tree had already turned nice an pink. Luckily they don't blossom all at the same time, so we have some colors in the backyard over the following months again. Quite welcome after a dark an gray winter.

As I mentioned already I trimmed the raspberry way back to about 20 centimeters from the ground. The branches already had some offshoots. But cutting them back will make them grow new offshoots from the ground. And I also spotted the first suckers that have grown from the roots next to the bush.
Last year I've dug out a few to give away and also sold a few of them via a local marketplace.
I'll let this little one grow a bit further before I dig it out and put it in a pot.

The almond tree is also producing a lot of shoots already. I have to tie the new shoots to the bamboo sticks again to keep it a bit in shape.

Visiting the garden center

Last year I started seeding my 'crops' quite late. I think is was already in April before I started. This resulted in very small plants of which many didn't survive. All my cucumber plants sadly died.
But this year I'm going to give it another try, so I visited my local garden center to buy some seeds and trays. They really have quite a lot of seeds for vegetables. It's almost too hard to make a choice.

I chose the seeds from vegetables that I had already grown before, my family likes and are easy to grow. I chose tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.

Seeding

I had also bought some trays and biodegradable seed pots. In the years before I seeded in a big tray, but I always had issues untangling the roots of the plants as they grew bigger, damaging the roots while doing this. I hope it will be better with these pots.

I still had a bag of seed-starting and propagation soil which I used to fill up the pots. I filled one entire tray with the tomato, cucumber and pepper seeds.

Experiment 1: the Oxeye

With the second tray I'm doing a bit of an experiment. I have a couple Oxeye plants in my backyard. I've bought these a couple of years ago and keep coming back every year (after dying off above the ground in winter). But last year I collected the seeds when the flowers were withering.

I kept them dry over the winter and have planted quite a lot of them in a second tray I. Since the seeds were so small I just dropped a few of them in each container. I've never tried anything like this, so I hope this experiment will work. Time will tell...

Experiment 2: Nepenthes

The second experiment is to create a cutting from one of my Nepentheses. My first Nepenthes had grown a new plant next to it last year, but the mother plant was growing one very long vine. Since I already wanted to cut it, I decided to see if I could grow a new plant from the cutting.

I've looked up a tutorial which showed it was quite easy. I bought some sphagnum moss in the garden center and put the cutting in a pot. At the end of the Youtube video I hear that it has quite a low success rate of about 20%, so I hope I am lucky. They also told that the mother plant is stimulated to grow new shoots when you trim it, so that would also be nice when that happens.

I've placed the new cutting in between his mother and big brother. I hope that helps.

So, this was my first #hivegarden update. I hope you enjoyed it. I will try to give an update of my garden every now and then. Thanks for reading my post. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Friendlymoose

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