Shallots and Garlic

I don't grow many Alliums - usually just Chives. I don't really consider Onions to have good VSR, and the one time I grew Shallots they never got beyond the miniscule stage. However, inspired recently by a number of fellow bloggers, such as Sue from Our Plot At Green Lane Allotments, Elaine from A Woman of The Soil, and Sara from Hilwards, I have decided to have a go with Shallots and Garlic myself. As you probably know, I don't have a huge amount of space available, so my policy is to strive for quality and diversity rather than quantity.

Amongst my order from Thompson and Morgan therefore was one pack of "Longor" Shallots (18 sets), and one pack of Spring-planting Garlic (4 heads).  "Longor" is a French type, described as "half-long". What a strange term. Presumably they are "half-short" as well.

Last Friday I had a day off work and I decided that since the weather was nice and the soil conditions were right I would plant out most of both types. I was mindful though that a return to much colder weather was forecast, so I kept back a few of each - hedging my bets just in case the first planting didn't make it.

Following my crop rotation plan, the Alliums went in the bed in which last year's Parsnips and Beetroot were grown. Due to shortage of space I am limiting myself to only what will fit into half of one of my raised beds, so not a lot! I have managed to squeeze in 12 Shallots and 23 cloves of Garlic.

Yes 23 is a strange number, but it is all that I could salvage because to my dismay when I opened the heads of garlic to split them into individual cloves two of the four were completely rotten!

Not a pretty sight, is it? It could have been worse though, because as soon as I discovered this I rang T and M and they agreed straightaway, without the slightest quibble, to replace the Garlic.

Planting the Shallots and Garlic was an easy enough task. I prepared the bed by digging it over lightly with a trowel (this is practical only when preparing a very small space, otherwise a proper spade will be required), incorporating into the soil the home-made compost I applied last week along with a few handfuls of pelleted chicken manure, and raking it flat. I then pushed the Shallots and Garlic into the soil at the relevant spacing (I used about 12" / 30cm between the Shallots and about 6" / 15cm between the Garlic cloves). They need to be firmly settled in so I ensured that about two thirds of their depth was covered, and then watered them in quite generously. The final stage was to cover the bed with netting supported by plastic hoops, in order to deter the foxes and birds.

Now all I have to do is weed and water occasionally, and wait until about August, when the plants should be ready for harvesting. Sounds suspiciously easy, doesn't it?

Blau-Gelb

The title of this post means "Blue and Yellow" in the German language. It is also the name of a German supermarket chain in which we used to shop many years ago when we lived in Germany for a short while. I wonder if it still exists today? When I Googled the term, this hardware business popped up, so maybe not. The name came back to me when I was editing some photos I took recently of Irises and Daffodils.

I think the colour combination of these two flowers side-by-side is very appealing. Unfortunately the Irises are already on their last legs and the daffs are only just opening up, so they don't overlap much.

These flowers are at the base of our Crab apple tree, in the circular flower-bed I had made for me this time last year.

There are not as many bulbs in there as I would like, simply because the apple tree roots won't permit it, but at least it looks tidy. More daffs are opening every day, so hopefully it will look more impressive in a few days' time.

Over-Wintered lettuce

Last year I acquired for the first time some decent cloches, and I have used them this Winter to protect some lettuce. Most types of lettuce will not normally survive our Winter without protection so I have in the past had to rely exclusively upon the hardier chicories for Winter salads. Harvesting home-grown lettuce in February and March is a pleasure to which I am unaccustomed!

Under the two long cloches devoted to this task I planted a total of 17 lettuces. They were of two different types - "Winter Density" and "All Year Round". In the photo above "Winter Density" is on the left.

The long cloches in November

A few days ago I took the cloches off, on a sunny day, in order to do a bit of maintenance. By this I mean removing any dead or yellowing leaves, cultivating the soil to aerate it, and giving the plants a bit of water. I judged that although these lettuce are likely to get bigger, I could justifiably harvest the first of them. After all, we wouldn't be able to eat them all at once, so it's best to start eating the first of them while they're young.

So, before replacing the cloches, I cut these two. One of each type.

Neither of them has much of a heart, because they are not fully mature, but as part of a mixed salad I think they are certainly acceptable. Here they are being supported by tomatoes, fennel and chicory from our Abel and Cole veg box, and a few home-grown salad sprouts:

Fire!

"We have Lift Off"! The first of my chilli seeds have germinated. They are ones of the variety "Fuego F1"

The seedlings are in little 3" pots, in a plastic propagator on the windowsill of our spare bedroom - directly above the radiator. (Notice the pieces of old carpet-tile protecting the paintwork).

The first of these seeds germinated 8 days after sowing, which I think is pretty good considering they had no artificial heat apart from the central heating radiator (daytime only!)

Here are some photos of the newborn babies...

By the way, the light brown object by the base of the bigger of the two seedlings is not the seed-casing; it's actually a tiny pebble in the compost, which the seedling is shoving aside.

My concern for the next couple of weeks will be that I may not be able to provide them with enough light to prevent them going leggy. On days when I'm at home I often find myself transferring the propagators to the other side of the house at lunchtime, so that I can maximise their opportunity to get direct sunlight.

Home-made Compost

Over the Christmas holiday and up till about the middle of January I was unwell and physically incapable of carrying out a task I normally try to get done over the holiday period - distributing last year's home-made compost.

This is a mucky task, and one that takes a fair bit of time and lots of hard work. I have three plastic compost bins like this one:

I reserve one of them for making leaf-mould, and the other two are for garden and kitchen waste. I try to rotate them, with one "cooking" while the other is filling up, but it doesn't always work as neatly as that. This time both bins were full and the task had become really urgent, since there was no longer anywhere to put vegetable peelings from the kitchen, and I really had to empty one of the bins. Fortunately last weekend both the weather and my health were conducive to a spot of compost-digging...

With the aid of a garden fork I removed the top layer of material in the bin (about one-third of its depth), and set it to one side on an old Army groundsheet. It was very sticky and a bit smelly too, and absolutely heaving with worms. Those of you who regularly follow my blog know full well that I have a penchant for displaying photos of worms.... I'm going to let you off lightly this time and just tell you there were thousands and thousands of worms. I'll just show you a photo of the partly-rotted stuff after the worms had wriggled into hiding:

After removal of the top layer, I was left with the good stuff - dark, crumbly, soil-like compost:

It is the worms that take the credit for producing this wonderful natural plant-food and soil-improver. I hardly do anything. I just keep adding more material throughout the year, and occasionally I aerate it by jabbing in a long pole and wiggling it about - nothing scientific at all, and I certainly don't go to any trouble balancing the greens with the browns (although I avoid putting in any large woody stems, which I take to the municipal tip).

I used my spade to load up my trusty trug-tub time after time, using it to transfer the material to my raised beds and bins. I lost count after a while, but I think I had about 20 trug-tub loads. In case you don't know what a trug-tub is, this is one - it's a fair bit bigger than a standard bucket:

I spread the compost roughly over the surface of the soil, to a depth of 2 or 3 inches. I didn't spend much time making it too even, because I know what will happen now - the Blackbirds will root about in it for the next few days, looking for insects, and the compost will be, shall we say "re-distributed". Maybe next weekend I'll rake it over and even it out.

You might just be able to make out the dark layer of compost on all the raised beds in this photo:

So that now all my raised beds and the big tubs have had a good dose of this compost, I can start thinking about sowing and planting, with a clear conscience in the knowledge that my gardening year's hardest task is complete. I'll leave the contents of other bin to rot down a bit more while this recently-emptied one slowly fills up again.

SBDS

I think this year may be the least successful year for some time in respect of my Purple Sprouting Broccoli.
 :-(

SBDS stands for "Sudden Brassica Death Syndrome" (well, I say it does...). This is what has happened:

I have no idea what caused this. The plant just collapsed, more or less overnight. I suspect that some horrible creature has gnawed through its roots.

Last Summer, when the plants were young and newly planted-out, most of them were attacked by the Cabbage Root Fly and several barely survived. These ones have never grown to the normal size, despite the relatively mild Winter. This is one of them:

This next photo is of one of the spares, which I planted-out very much later than I would have liked, in the big tub which had housed my "Maskotka" cherry tomatoes during the Summer. It looks very healthy, just not very big:

Only two of my six plants (the ones unaffected by the Cabbage Root Fly) have grown to the normal size for this vegetable (which is about four feet tall). This is the best plant of the six in my raised bed:

The other big one decided to produce its first shoots in November, about 3 months earlier than expected. However, it is still alive and is still producing a few spears every now and then.



Normally, at about this time I would be eagerly anticipating an ample (perhaps bountiful?) crop of one of my favourite veg, but this year there will definitely not be a glut. I am determined to do better next year, and I shall be sending off for some of those packs of "Grow Your Own" nematodes to coincide with when my next batch of PSB is due to be planted out.

Spotlight on Crocus

At this time of the year there isn't a huge amount of colour in my garden, so I have to make the most of it...

Here are some photos of another batch of Crocuses. The cream-coloured ones are called "Cream Beauty" and are flowering at the time stated on the pack they came in - i.e. "February / March", but the purple ones (just labelled "Purple") are supposed to flower in March / April. The Yellow-and-black stripey ones are "Gypsy Girl". And the light purple / blue one right at the end is one whose name I don't know - naturalised several years ago.