The Garlic Story

DSC00499, originally uploaded by funkylittledani.

We planted our Garlic in October last year - 'Overwintering' it's called. I think we have a few pics on another camera of them in various stages of growth, so we hope to have them on here soon. We were really pleased that they seemed to be growing more or less unaided ( we mulched them sometime in early spring and that was about it). However a week ago I saw something that made me panic..........the garlic had started bolting. Not just one bulb, but ALL OF THEM. How could we have missed it!!? Now, I knew that this was not a good thing. But instead of being rational and waiting until I got home to calmly set about find out what to do in one of my many allotment books, I freaked. I dug one up and went to the lady down the end who I knew grew garlic on her plot. I don't know her name, but I know her dog's name (oh dear!). Anyway she told me that it wasn't anything to worry about, it just might not store as well and that it was nowhere near as bad as an onion or a leek bolting.

We dug them all up anyway! But they looked great, and some of bulbs were really huge. As you can see, it doesn't look half bad and we were really proud of the first veg that we planted ourselves to have a successful crop.

They are now busy drying in our shed.....

And this is the QD potato bed now!  Look at it go!!

Potatoes again

This is the QD potato bed before we planted any potatoes.....and at the far end, the disastrous Jerusalem Artichoke bed (I won't go into that now!!!)

If you're wondering where all the posts are...

We promise we will be uploading all the pictures we have along with loads more comments very soon!

A Photo with Carol Klein

Check us out! Here we are at Gardeners' World Live with none other than presenter and expert Carol Klein! We had a brilliant day and got lots of lovely veg plants, including the Sunflower you can see in the picture.

Potatoes 2 - Helen is good at digging

Today, Helen planted the B&Q potatoes. They hadn’t chitted a lot as we had bought them a bit late, and seen as they were earlies, we thought we had better get them in! I heard somewhere that you should “plant your lates in early and your earlies in late”, so at least we’re doing it right (even if it was an accident!!). I must say that Helen did a stirling job, digging a tough area, in much straighter lines than I could have. We’ll have to see which one’s come up first. The QD ones were chitted, but were a low price pack, however the B&Q ones are more expensive, but will also have to fight their way to the daylight, as well as the fact they haven’t been chitted!

Potatoes!

Today we planted our potatoes! We got the potatoes from QD, our local discount shop, they are maincrop Maris Bard (I think). Helen took charge of chitting the potatoes at her flat on the window sill and it worked really well. Each potato had quite a number of ‘chits’ on them – we placed them on eggboxes and loo rolls in Helen’s front room, so she could keep an eye on them!

We also have a plan for some B&Q seed potatoes we bought. I have no idea which type they were, all I know is that they were earlies! A colleague mentioned that potatoes are very good for digging up the earth for you. Therefore, you don’t necessarily need to double dig the area you are using. We have decided to use an area we haven’t even dug yet, dig a trench to plant them and let them do all the hard work! It’s an experiment, but we will let you know how it goes.