Hi weirdos! In today’s post, I’d like to share with you my experiences and plans connected to my little city garden. I hope to inspire you to try out your own experiments and gardening fun. Let’s dive in!

One of my ideas is growing mushrooms – more specifically, inoculating tree logs with oyster mushroom and shiitake spawn. Oyster mushroom is an edible fungus that grows on dead wood, with a delicate taste and soft texture. Shiitake, originally from Japan, also grows on wood and belongs to the same family as button mushrooms. Both are very healthy and packed with protein, vitamins, and minerals.

Inoculating logs works like this: you drill holes in the wood and insert wooden dowels infused with mushroom spawn. Then you seal the holes with beeswax and store the logs in a dark and humid place for a few months. During this time, the spawn spreads inside the wood and prepares to fruit.

I’ve already got myself one big, solid log, and from February to September I plan to inoculate it with oyster mushroom spawn. If it works, by September I’ll be able to place it in my little garden and wait for the mushrooms to fruit. Once the spawn takes hold, mushrooms can keep sprouting for years!

Later this month, I’d like to get a second log and try inoculating shiitake as well. Fingers crossed – maybe it’ll work!

Another one of my ideas for growing vegetables and herbs is using a greenhouse. It’s the first week of January now, and in just two months it’ll be time to start planning, or even planting, the first greenhouse crops – weather permitting. And it looks like it’ll be warm enough.

And that brings me to the last but no less important element of my garden: the soil. Soil is the foundation of every crop, so it needs proper care and attention. It provides plants with water, nutrients, and air. It also affects the flavor, color, and fragrance of the plants.

One thing I know for sure after my first year of city gardening is this: soil is the most important part. That’s why today, taking advantage of the dry weather, I dug through my little beds and empty pots to loosen the soil and let some air in. At the same time, I added a bit of garden lime to reduce acidity before spring. Just before planting vegetables, I’ll definitely spread some organic nitrogen-rich fertilizer – most likely chicken manure pellets. But even now, it’s worth looking after the gardener’s best little helpers: earthworms, who’ll soon be searching for food.

So, if you don’t have an earthworm feeder in your garden yet, start burying potato peels, carrot tops, parsley, or even apple scraps in your beds – worms love them! Lettuce leaves or raked-up tree leaves work too. And if you bury too much and the worms can’t eat it all, even better – the leftovers will decompose in the soil and turn into natural compost!

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