This post is a longtime overdue, but for the gardening nerds out there I hope the wait is worth it.

Our summer spent at the family home in Switzerland was amazing and the time spent in the garden just perfect. Sunshine and steady rain helped in bringing an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables to the table every night for the two months we stayed.

The gardening in Switzerland was such a different experience to our usual subtropical climate setting here in Queensland, Australia. The soil’s fertility, partly due I imagine to having been grown on for centuries was rich in nutrients and seemed to hold on to water much longer than our previous gardens in Australia.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing in the garden though. Our entire crop of tomatoes consisting of six to eight different varieties was struck down with disease from the constant rain. What was looking like a summer glut of hundreds of tomatoes left us with just a handful to sample… and the weeds, well let’s just say they kept us pretty busy.

My appreciation of gardening and admiring other peoples’ gardens began nearly two years ago and this trip back to Europe was like discovering gardening through a set of new eyes. Having lived and travelled there for the past 10 years, I had never really appreciated the beauty and pride people take with their yards in the summer months. It seemed every second house has a vegetable patch of some kind. The community gardens, especially within Switzerland are just incredible. (This I’ll share soon in a post on its own!)

A huge thanks goes out to our family back in Switzerland for letting us run the patch and sharing your knowledge with us for our extended stay, it was an experience we’ll never forget and we look forward to doing it all again when we visit next time.

For now I’ll leave you with the photos from our summer gardening adventure broken up into two posts for easy viewing.

Keep scrolling or click here for Part 2