The large phone photography post on plants, chilis and gardening!

The spring/summer (pretty much the same in Finland) has finally arrived and we've been able to start our small scale farming in our farming plot.

Before planting everything on the plot we'll just have to work on the soil a bit, removing any weeds and breaking up the clumpy soil a bit. You can see one ready "plot" and another still under work.

_{And our rhubarb on the bottom right corner in the photo above!}

Above you can see what this looks always before we start. For some reason, we have had a habit of turning the soil around in autumn and then breaking the lumps in spring to easily remove the weeds and roots.

BAM!

And in the photo below you can see the results!

Yes.. the results of the work my wife did earlier on the other side of our farming plot.

I'm not an expert on this, I've mostly lived city life through my life.

Basically, I'm just sticking the digging fork to the ground, lifting it up, shaking the fork a bit (to make the soil clump stuck on it to break) and then start picking up the weeds and roots.

First the lump of soil before shaking it...

Above you can see the results of some serious "shaking". Most of the soil clump broke and only few pieces are left. The soil around here has a lot of clay in it which we have been trying to improve by adding sand and "good quality soil" every year. It's starting to look quite good.

Then I'm going through all the weeds on the ground. I'm preferring digging them up with the fork like this, as then I'm getting the roots from the ground too. If I'd be pulling only the leaves off, it'd usually leave the roots in the ground.

Also, I'm not going to use Roundup or similar. I'm happy with manual labor.

We're also having our good friends, the worms in the soil with us. We had a lot of them in our plot and I'm thinking it's a really good sign that we're doing good job in the farming plot.

And this is what I've got from less than a square meter (according to my estimation). The feet on the picture were not dug from the soil.

... or were they?

Then back at home. We're pre-growing quite many plants, including but not limited to:

• Strawberries
• Tomatoes
• Cucumber
• Zucchini
• Kale
• Some flowers 'n shit

The photo above is related to the chili breeding project of @dysprosium - it's important to comment, that all of the seeds germinated. However, you can see one empty peat pot in there and it's because I accidentally let the soil too dry and it died.

Sorry.

Here we can see my hydroponic system for chili. Everything is growing really well and I'm having flowers blooming and even some chili pods growing!

We can see the blooming chili plant.

Aaaand a curious chili pod. It's growing straight up and the thing is, I shouldn't even have chili's looking like this.
I might have had an accidental crossover in two different species and getting my own kind of chili's.

It's fine though, however I'm not sure if I'll be getting right kind of spiciness and flavor!

Last but not least, I had put some of the chili breeding project seeds to a smaller hydroponic system (bought on discount) and I started to have some mold issues, as some mold was growing on the rock wool.

So I.. kind of let them dry a bit in attempt to get rid of the mold.

They all died.

Sorry again.