Posted in Garden Diary, The Old Garden In Bristol on Sunday, December 18th 2011 (8.28 PM).
The frost has really started to come in in the past week. I’m learning which parts of the garden are hit by it the hardest: the sheltered area between shed and house stays frost-free the longest, and the other side of the shed, where the bee house is, also seems to stay fairly sheltered. The middle of the garden, and the prime planting area, get hit the hardest, although so far this winter the perennial plants seem to be largely bearing up. Fingers crossed.
After I planted the garlic, three weeks ago, there were a few small cloves left over from the bulb. Today, I planted those up in the containers that, this year, we grew carrots in. The carrots – more of that free BBC seed – did not really grow very well, possibly because the containers are a little small. We will see how the garlic does: we’re starting, in these containers, with the least-viable-looking cloves already, so there won’t really be any scientific conclusions we can draw from it.
The three-weeks-planted garlic hasn’t appeared above the surface yet. K says I’m being silly, looking regularly, because at this time of year it won’t break the surface for months. But, still, I keep looking to see if sprouts have appeared.
carrot, frost, garlic, planting, weather, winter
Posted in Garden Diary, The Old Garden In Bristol on Tuesday, August 30th 2011 (7.10 PM).
This week, we have:
- Continued harvesting runner beans, and also the first of the green beans
- Harvested a box of radishes, leaving the two we planted a couple of weeks ago still developing.
- We’ve still not quite got the hang of radishes. We thinned out the still-growing boxes, rather more than previously, in the hope of getting a nice bulb on every plant.
- Harvested the last of the carrots.
- Harvested pretty much all of the mature Swiss chard – the baby leaves are still untouched
- Thinned out the smallest beetroot plants.
Before long, I suspect, we’ll have to look at chopping back some of our perennials for the winter. The camomile plant is definitely looking a bit too straggly and overgrown; the sage needs harvesting for its own health; and so, I suspect, do the chives, having taken a bit of a battering in the recent weather. We’re also not entirely sure when would be best to start harvesting our spring onions. They feel as if they’ve been in the ground an awfully long time, some of them, but their stems don’t seem to have reached a good width yet. Well, this always was intended to be a Learning Year.
bean, beetroot, camomile, carrot, chard, green bean, radish, runner bean, sage, scallion, spring onion, swiss chard, thinning