Winter garden overview

Happy new year everyone!

We collected all Our garden adventures, routines, and preparation for winter and in wintertime. In the wintertime, our garden is in hibernation. We spent most of our time indoors.

Now that spring has come we shake up the ground and welcome all the new life that is bursting out of the garden! Wood is being chopped for all the campfires to come with the razor-sharp ax that Weltevree has send us ! 

The lawn is being taken care of with our brand new Hover mower we got send over from BLACK+DECKER and it’s awesome! 

Check out our full lawn care routine blogpost over here!

 We hope you enjoyed our vlog, when the summer begins we will make a new Garden overview regarding our spring and beginning of the summer season! Until then we will have a lot of other themed video’s coming up for you! See you next time!

Love,
  Jolanda, Michiel,
Miley Haley & Quinn

Winter garden overview

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Spring lawn care routine

 

Spring Garden Prep: getting our garden Ready for summer


Getting Your grass lawn Ready for Summer.

When all the life starts turning back in our garden and the grass lawn shoots up again, our fruit trees burst out in big fluffy “cotton candy like” balls of blossom. We take our boots and hit the garden. Feeling completely green-depraved after the long and cold winter months. So we are preparing the lawn for a wonderful summer filled with cuddles and playing and chilling in the thick and soft green grass!

Our garden has a few functions:

  1. Grow our own food
  2. Be a place of beauty and an oasis for us to relax and come together.
  3. Be a place for our kids to play,  learn, discover and have adventures.
  4. Create biodiversity and nurture all insects and animals that live here.

The green green grass

The first thing we do is we take care of our lawn. It’s the center of our garden and provides us a colorful bright green carpet on which we can play and relax the whole summer.  I like it when the grass is a bit longer so it can wave in the wind. So that it’s nice and thick and fluffy when you lye down on it. Taking care of the lawn is the number one thing we tend to.

Trim
First, we mow the lawn. We have a small lawn and the new hover mower we got from BLACK+DECKER is perfect for the job! I like it when the grass is about 10  long and really soft and wavy… But if you never maw it shorter the quality of the grass will go down, eventually it will get too long and when you mow it too late you will end up with a lumpy patch of yellow grass filled with dead brown spots. Not Ideal. So the first thing we do is trim it down after the long winter to give all the new grass straws that are coming up more light!  This used to be Michiel’s job, but it has become so much fun with our new hover that I wanted to do it. The whole spring and summer we will be mowing it at least once a week to keep healthy.

Scarify
After the winter the grass tends to look a bit unhealthy.
The build-up of dead and dying grassroots, shoots, runners, and other living and dead plant materials and moss which can accumulate at the roots of the grass can make the lawn look a bit Grimm. So we scratch the soil’s surface with a “Rake” to give the new coming up grass more air and room to grow.

Seed
Seed in new grass seeds to fill up the dead patches that may have arisen and that will make the grass overall full and thick in no time.

Aerate
Poke in little holes in the lawn using a pitchfork or a special roller with spikes.
This will give the soil more air and water witch will result in better root growth and a fuller thicker lawn to chill and play on. (plus the earthworms will thank you for it! and they are playing a vital part with their composting activities in keeping our soil (and therefore our plants) healthy!

Feed
Provide your lawn with plenty of nutrients to grow and flourish this upcoming summer season. Organic lawn fertilizer will improve the overall health of your lawn. Always use organic fertilizer and try and stay away from synthetic fertilizers. That way you are sure you are not poisoning your soil and water with chemical pest and weed control additives that are usually in the mix and the synthetic fertilizer runoff is really harmful to the environment. 

Water
Save rainwater in a rain barrel to water your lawn and give your grass the best start it could get to grow into a perfect green fluffy and thick carpet!

This is our lawn spring ritual we do every year and this way we get to enjoy our lawn every single day during the summer!

Enjoy the upcoming summer days!

Blog by: Jolanda Marti
Photography: Michiel Fook

Floating on air!

BLACK+DECKER send us this awesome lightweight hover mower, and its something I’ve never seen before! Normally this part is a job for Michiel since he is strong enough to handle a heavy lawnmower in the first place. But this friendly light powerful beasty is something I can handle with ease! It weighs just as much as an average folding chair. Plug & play!

The moment I turn on the power on it the mower is lifted and I can slide over the grass without putting any pressure on my arms. No more pushing and pulling like a madman. Just steering the gliding mower over the lawn effortlessly! Getting in and around all the fruit trees and borders without a hassle! This is actually so much fun to do! and when I’m done I just pull the plug and lift it up and store it away. Easy peasy!

Want to learn more? Read all about it here!

Thanks, Black+Decker we will never want anything else after this!

Instagram moments

We live on our lawn. It’s basically a living space for us and our kids to play, chill and cuddle on! Check out all of these moments that where on our lawn:

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Spring lawn care routine

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Getting a greener home

Energy friendly home
Living in a small home of only 50 square meters (=538 square feet) is one of the choices we’ve made to be more sustainable as a family. But because this is a home build in 1952, the Insolation was not what we wanted it to be. So in the last couple of years, we made some big steps in improving the insolation of our home.

For instance, we got double glazing in our windows in 2014, we insolated the roof back in 2017 (watch this dutch vlog from back then), and Insolated the crawling space under our home in 2018 (see this Englisch vlog), and we have LED lighting in our home.

This whole process is really expensive so we are taking one step at the time and every single change is taking us a little bit closer to our eco-friendly home dream.

Next steps we hope to take very soon:
-Insolating the double brick outside walls.
-Energy management system to track how much we use.
-Solar panels.
-Floor insolation.
-Heat pump hybrid system. (And Floor heating to make it more effective)

Because we are just a bunch of hippies on an eco-friendly mission Eneco asked if we were interested in a collab with them. So we did! We visited another family who is a few steps ahead of us and already has a lot of the eco-friendly solutions we are dreaming of in their home! Oh my! We are loving it!

And they had such a great family with two lovely little boys and a playful dog. We had a great time with them.
We were invited to stay for dinner so we did! Tiny little bummer to see all those throw-away plastic take-out containers on the table, but I guess our eco-crazy hippie standard is next level for most people. And they were certainly more energy-friendly than us! We all do what we can. baby steps.  So we all enjoyed the food and the lovely company.

Eneco made a lovely video of our visit! (Sorry, it’s only in dutch) You can check it out down here:

We went back home feeling inspired! Hopefully some day in the near future we get to have that energy-green home we are dreaming of. Until then I’m just making it greener with all of my plants!

Love,
  Jolanda, Michiel,
Miley Haley & Quinn

Oh, and p.s. Thanks for the levely flowers Eneco! So thoughtfull love it!

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