In article ,
Dirk Weber wrote:

Billy schreef:

You are right, of course, we will be moving on to more appropriates
subjects now.

ok, makes more sen;-)

Germany, eh? Woher? Do you grow cucumbers, and if so, what kind? What
else do you grow?
You see the coordinates in the signature? Have a look at openmaps or some
other map site and you will see that we live in western Germany, in a
region called "Eifel", a bit hilly, a lot of forests and unfortunately not
so many work places. We live some 3 or 4 miles away from the Nürburgring,
maybe you have heard of that racing course.

We bought a small house here in Arft some years ago. It is a bit older, was
built in 1928 as a small farm house (very small farm, just one or two cows
and a pig, people in this region were very poor. We have some 600 square
meters of ground in total which results in some 350 square meters for our
garden.

Since we are no farmers (my wife is a nurse and I am an office worker) we
do not have much time for gardening. So we just have that very old plum
tree and a lot of grass. We plan to plant some hedges in order to get rid
of that ugly fence. And some bushes for the toads to hide under.

We live some 520 meters above sea level which results in our climate to be
a bit rougher than in the Rhine valley. This year's spring was lousy, cold
and wet. Some two weeks ago we even had some night frost, today it is
rather misty.

There is not really a chance to grow cucumbers here unless you grow them in
a greenhouse. Same with tomatoes. But we had very tasty strawberries here.
Unfortunately my wife is allergic against strawberries, so we removed them.

We intend to grow some herbs. Problem is that we have little time and there
is only a short time to bring the seeds into the ground. In March we still
had snow and it was rather cold, now it is already too late. So maybe next
year. We will set up a kind of "pocket greenhouse" for the herbs then it
should work.

Groetjes uit Arft,

Dirk Weber

ps

that is Dutch and means greetings from Arft ;-)
I worked for some three years in The Netherlands and learned some Dutch
there.
dw

Don't be so modest, it was only 15°C (60°F) today here in northern
California, and 520 meters (1,700 ft.) isn't that high. Surely, there
will be time to grow a garden. You have those wonderfully long days in
the summer. There are tomatoes that only take 60 days to ripen (Stupice,
Glacier,Siletz, usw), lettuce, herbs that you must be able to grow. If
you are interested, I'm sure other posters can recommend short season
tomatoes too, or you can look on Google. Maybe you just need a wind
break. If you have seen anything about our discussions on "lasagna
gardening", you should know that it is a low effort means of
establishing a Bio-garden.

We've driven the autobahn that goes to Trier and followed the Mosel from
Koblenz to Trier, so we know a little of your region, besides, I love
Bitburg beer ;O)

When we were traveling, we would always stay in Bad Ems. We arrived
there accidentally, in early April of 1982. We were in jet-lag, and it
was snowing, and all we wanted was to get off the road, get warm, and
sleep. Altogether now, we've spent nearly a year there. We still have
friends there, and feel very attached to the place.

Hope you hang around the newsgroup, and I hope you get a garden in this
year, even a small one.

Tschuß,

70 miles north of San Francisco, region 9
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/HZinn_page.html