Planting and harvesting

Last week, we managed a day of gardening on Monday and an afternoon at the plot on Sunday. 

Monday morning started at home in the garden greenhouse.

I decided to plant the soft neck garlic - Solent Whyte - in a large pot. The pot had previously housed some bush tomatoes and so was still filled with compost. I removed  about a third of the depth of old compost and replenished with fresh. The garlic roots will have plenty of depth in the new compost and it would have been a waste to refill the pot completely.

Once planted the pot was placed outside where it could experience the frosts that are no doubt still to come. Garlic needs to be subjected to a cold spell in order for cloves to form, otherwise each clove planted will just form a solid bulb. To be honest we'd given up growing garlic as we seemed to have little success but this year I've decided to try again. We also have some hard neck garlic - White Casablanca - which was planted on the allotment in September.

We have started a small garden project. As happens parts of our garden are in need of a bit of renovation. We've started to clear one area under one of our crab apple trees.

Although at this time of year the area looks fairly open, once the tree starts to leaf up the ground around the tree will be shaded, so we decided woodland type planting would be appropriate. We'd decided to plant snowdrops, English bluebells and native primroses as a starting point. Snowdrops were making an appearance in local garden centres but, at over £4 for a pot of about four bulbs of common snowdrops, it was going to be quite an expensive way of making a splash. I decided instead to order some snowdrops and bluebells in the green from an online supplier. As these arrived before the garden area was ready for planting, we decided to divide the plants into small groups and pot them up to be planted out later.

Once planted the pots were placed on the patio, where we can keep an eye on them and a few days on they look to be doing just fine. I posted a video here.

The primroses will be gathered from the allotment once they are growing well. They self seed readily there.

The above kept us busy Monday morning and in the afternoon we headed for the plot. We needed to harvest more vegetables, as stocks at home were getting low. As it was a reasonably pleasant day, we managed a couple of jobs there too.

One of the beds of green manure had been more or less killed by frost and so, Martyn dug that in.

Another bed that we had cleared earlier was beginning to sprout couch grass and the area was in danger of being reclaimed by the weeds. When the bed was initially turned over the ground was fairly hard and it was impossible to remove grass roots from the solid lumps of earth. The weather, since then, had done its job and softened the soil and so we set to and removed as many of the couch grass roots as we could.

The pile on the bed, on the right of the above photo, is made up of the roots that we have removed from this and another recently cleared bed. The plan is to burn these when we can. With this in mind on Sunday we moved the pile off the bed and into a position where the roots can't suddenly gain a foothold and regrow and if the weather co-operates they may dry off enough to burn.

On Sunday whilst, Martyn moved the pile of weed roots, I decided to knock down the clods of soil on some of the 'lumpy' beds Usually at this time of year the soil would be too wet and claggy to make this possible, so I wanted to take advantage of the drier than usual conditions. A few days of constant rain would soon turn the soil into unworkable mud.

There are still some beds where the soil is still lumpy as shown in the photo on the bottom right above. Hopefully I can tackle these on our next plot visit.

Of course the aim was to gather a few vegetables to see us through the week, so each day before we came home we harvested some supplies.

4 February

Amongst our regular 'pickings' was our first red cabbage. Although the cabbage doesn't look very big it was solid and we cooked five double helpings of braised red cabbage. As the recipe freezes well, four batches have been frozen and we enjoyed the other lot freshly cooked. The recipe used is basically this one  but I added some raisins and cinnamon to the mix.

10 February

Before you wonder how we managed to use up all the carrots and leeks harvested on Monday, we did share some with my sister.

Our complete monthly harvests are listed here.

This week I am linking to Harvest Monday hosted on 

Dave's blog Our Happy Acres

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett