Food ‘n Drink

We’ve finally gotten out into the garden and made a start on the winter preparations. Yesterday we went to the local garden centre and picked up some farm manure and today the sun decided to show a little so we made a start on getting the ground dug over. The main issue was to get the garlic and shallots planted, however despite over half the length of our garden we’ve only planted less than half the garlic cloves we have and still have some shallots left too. These don’t need a great deal of space between each other, and each garlic clove will produce a head of garlic, each shallot part will product 2-4 shallots. We managed to get 11 cloves and 12 shallots planted however we’re going to dig an extra section elsewhere and put the rest in there, hopefully giving us enough garlic for the summer.

I then started on the fruit and salad area. Our raspberry canes have put out some extra shoots which means more canes next year, thus more raspberries! However a few of these had come out of their area so I had to dig them up and replant them amongst the others. I then dug up the remaining strawberry plants that had grown off the runners from the strawberry pot. In total we have 12 plants from the runners plus a couple more to be taken out of the pot and planted in the ground. However we had to dig over the front area and dig in the manure before replanting the strawberries. Of course with the raspberries not being dug up the manure was just piled around each cane at the base of it so that the nutrients still get into the soil.

I’ve made a small start on the back area where the potatoes are to go but this is going to be the biggest job. This past summer we had no intention of ever using the area so all the garden rubbish that couldn’t go out in the garden recycling bin (ie. not weeds, grass or branches) kinda got buried in this patch. The garden, before we started on it, was pretty much used as the builder’s dumping ground so there’s a lot of rubbish, bricks, rocks, plastic, metal and god know what else in there, so we have to dig and sift through everything. However once it’s done we should fit 10 potato plants in there for a main crop of potatoes which should be good