My Little Garden in Dubai

I have updated this post a bit since writing it back in 2014. I have learned a few things since then and have experimented a lot. There aren't many updates, but those minor updates are worth publishing. 1) Planting Time Start planting at the right time of the year. Plants need time to adjust and adapt to the new environment. When you buy plants from the nursery 90% of the time they had been kept under the shade cloth and not in direct sunlight. In order to thrive they first need to adjust to the sun levels. They also need to grow roots. When you buy too late into the year (actually I mean growing season, that is closer to late spring) plants don't have enough time to adapt and many plants either die or struggle, because they don't know where to put their energy into - growing roots or handling the sun. This is my personal observation. It doesn't mean you can't buy anything in spring but if it was me I'd wait till around September-October, actually preferably...

The Soil Matters - basic soil mix recipe

Hello my fellow gardeners, Today I’d like to briefly talk to you about soil and how do we create the perfect soil mix. This is one of the questions I receive most often. I grew up in Russia, as some of you may know already. We lived in a part of Russia where soil is called “chernozem”. It is a kind of soil with black color and contains high percentage of humus. It is very fertile and is sometimes called black gold. I grew up thinking that all soils around the world are black and when I took up gardening I had no idea that things can be otherwise. You can imagine my surprise when I found out that there are many different types of soils around the world. Turns out not only the color of soils differ but the composition too. I won’t go into details about soil composition and types of soils in this post, will leave it for later.. Soils can be of three major types: sand, clay and silt. Different combination of these make the soils around the world. In this part of the world we have ...

Make Soil Initiative

Hello my fellow gardeners, I totally forgot to post about this amazing initiative called make soil. It lets gardeners all around the world to make soil together. The idea is to make compost with shared resources that otherwise would go to a dump. You register at their site and either create a “site” to receive composting materials, and/or join other peoples’ sites around your area. You can do both, for times when you have more than you can compost. I just received my first drop off today from Sumithra, who dropped off three bags of orange peels and a huge bucket of Bokashi. She composts but had too much. On the Make Soil site you can specify what you accept, when to come to your place etc., and if you’re the one contributing you can see what the site you’re dropping the materials to accepts etc. Only registered users can see and join sites. Registration takes a minute and is straight forward. Have you joined already? You can do so here: https://www.makesoil.org/