Full Circle Garlic

One of my gardening ambitions is to become self sufficient in as many areas of growing as I can, closing the loop to reduce the amount of inputs my garden needs. This year I grew peas and many different flowers from my own saved seed, and this week I have added garlic to the list. I bought in my garlic last Autumn and after a very good crop, I have replanted my own cloves for next year's harvest. I hope this marks the end of buying in seed garlic.

Here is a photo diary of my garlic crop to show you the entire journey over one year.

October 2020 I purchased seed garlic for planting.

And plant it I did. About 50+ cloves, across a few different beds.

I covered the cloves with soil, straw and seaweed.

And up it came.

Throughout the season, I gradually added compost and seaweed for nutrients but also as mulch as the bulbs can begin to push up through the soil.

Then I started harvesting it from the end of June to August.

And drying it.

November 2021 and I still have lots of perfectly preserved dry garlic in the garage and I have replanted some of it for next year's harvest.

And that's one main crop set in motion for next year.  Autumn and winter are my favourite gardening months which makes garlic one of my top choice vegetables for growing at home. You can plant garlic NOW so get going if it's something you'd like to do.

Garden Diary 22nd March 2021

I am slowly expanding my growing space for edibles by layering any cardboard that enters the house, and covering with compost. I've also used empty compost bags, spread open, to cover bare soil as protection from the elements and to warm it up. I like doing this gradually as it gives me time to work out best positions for sun and wind shelter, as well as considering the location of plants in relation to each other. I don't want to accidentally cause shade where it is unwanted.

In the above photo we have rhubarb to the fore, with the Jerusalem artichokes on the right. Stella cherry tree behind, with strawberries in the long bed on the right. Containers have Miranda potatoes and the straw in the background beds also contain these. In between is garlic in various places, broad beans and leftovers from last year including beetroot and broccoli which I have left standing for the birds. The broccoli should actually be sprouting now but they suffered too much insect and bird damage. There are raspberries, lemon balm and chives in there too. To the left of the beds, behind the bright green container, you can see one of two small Regina cherry trees I have. All my cherry trees are coming into leaf and I hope to have plenty flowers this year, at least, as I have two different varieties now. Last year I only had the Regina. A few cherries will be the cherry on....forget it.

Garlic and broad beans

Spring flowers are doing their job providing colour for me and food for insects.

Anemone

Primrose

Signs of life are appearing on my trees. Hazel and Rowan photographed below. 

Hazel

Rowan

I am getting really excited for the coming growing season. I've done significant work planting perennials such as fruit, nut and berry trees as well as soft fruit and native climbers like honeysuckle and dog rose. I feel like a bit of form is coming to the once green grass canvas. Really buzzing about the native flowers that should come up in the grass too. 

Till next time..

New Fruit Beds

I've been doing quite a bit of work in the garden the last week, mainly digging out compost from the big heap. Some of this stuff has been sitting there for years and is almost black. It looks good and I hope it's not full of weed seeds, although it probably is. 

I have a lot of new perennial plants for the garden, largely trees and hedging (you can see a list here) and ordering is so easy but when I see them all laid out in front of me, the task seems bigger. Everything was put straight into pots but I don't want to wait long before I get everything in the ground. I want most things to go into our existing hedgerow which is between us and our neighbour. The hedgerow is a mix of planted trees and shrubs, wild plants and brambles and dead trees. I want to mix in the new plants, without creating too much disturbance. Even though some of the trees are snags (standing dead trees) and it's very overgrown, it is a fantastic habitat for birds and insects and hopefully small mammals (a hedgehog was spotted in the garden). So my dilemma is how to insert new plants and allow them to compete with the existing growth. I'll figure it out.

What I have done is made a new bed for my strawberry plants using my own compost and stones from the garden, laid over sheets of cardboard. I actually extended it after this photo was taken thinking my 10 plants could use more space. I've also put straw on top. The reasoning behind the stones is that they will absorb heat during the day and radiate it at night, keeping the plants a bit warmer than if there were no stones!

I'll put in the plants in a week or two.

Today I planted my raspberry canes (Glen Ample - summer fruiting) in a new area that I previously prepared using cardboard and my own compost.

I have 10 canes. In the garage are long pieces of wood waiting to be cut and built into a support frame and hopefully I'll be updating this post with a photo of the installed support next week! And photos of the strawberries in situ.

Grow Write Guild #5 What Does Your Garden Sound Like?

My garden is loud with the sound of birds. Not just the wild birds but the big flock of ducks, chickens and geese in the small farm that is right next door to me. I have made videos of my children in the garden and during playback realised the symphonic avian soundtrack that I have become so used to.

There is a small lane that runs parallel to the end of our garden and very occasionally a small, old tractor passes. I hear the engine starting and the tractor slowly rolling to a move before I see it through the thick cypress trees.

The road to the front of the house is quiet and I hear the chatting voices of the pairs of walkers approaching the house, or the barking from the neighbour's garden letting me know that someone is walking a dog. 

In the summer, particularly in the lower half of the garden, insect sound levels rise, primarily bees and flies. I left loads of ragwort bloom last summer and it was the star of the floral show when it came to attracting invertebrates.

I love the sound of my garden.

Grow Write Guild #4 Write about your Garden Mentor or Muse

 You may notice that I have skipped the third prompt - Describe Your Garden Right Now. My last post pretty much did that and I am bored of writing about my own garden, which is why I started using these prompts. Onwards!

I started gardening in 2012, after doing pretty much no growing of any sort before this. I think it coincided with the beginning of a natural inclination to nest (I had my first baby the following year), an addiction to the self-sufficiency promoting TV series, River Cottage, and a throwaway comment by a person I admired saying that they grew their own veg.

As my interest grew and I started to check out gardening books from the library, I became  acquainted with Joy Larkcom whose books I now own and who I even met in person which she gave a talk in my local GIY (Grow It Yourself) group. I loved her story of taking her husband and children on a year long campervan tour of Europe in the 70's to research vegetables, bringing new seed varieties and growing/harvesting/cooking techniques back to England. I was also encouraged to hear that she took time out of work to raise her kids, and then returned to have an important, creative career. Any story of parents who go on to have interesting careers after spending time out of work to raise their kids makes me excited as I am currently in the staying-at-home stage (well I guess plenty people are in 2020 with the covid lockdown but my housebound state has been going on for four and a half years).

Another element of growing food that gets me excited is seed production and saving. The previously mentioned GIY group also held a talk with Madaline McKeever who owns Brown Envelope Seeds in Skibbereen, one of only two places in Ireland raising and harvesting their own seeds (the other place is Seed Savers in Co Clare). Again, she was a woman who had raised her family and had changed careers when she switched from dairy farming to seed production. The idea of having a business that concentrates on a micro element (micro in focus, not in importance or workload) of food production draws me in far more than an expansive endeavour.

Writing this post makes me miss educational talks incredibly! There are plenty more people whose work and contributions I admire, especially local people whose gardens I see and hear about. And it is the local gardens that are really sustaining me at the moment as I walk the roads again and again and again….

Purchases Made for the Growing Season 2021

I made three deliciously satisfying orders in the last two weeks and now I must stop. I purchased the seeds from Green Vegetable Seeds, which is the business of Klaus Laitenberger who is very knowledgeable and sensitive to the particulars of the Irish climate. The rest were bought in Future Forests in Bantry, which is the most wonderful business and I will go no further than them for any of my trees, fruit and shrubs going forward. A lot of my existing seeds were grown and harvested in Skibbereen by Brown Envelope Seeds and others were generously free from GIY Ireland. Enjoy reading my additions to my inventory.

Trees

I focused on fruit and native trees and purchased everything bare root, which is cheaper and easier to transport.

1 x Irish Peach apple tree (I already have 1 x Bramley Seedling and 1 x Beauty of Bath)

2 x pear trees (1 x Concorde and 1 x Doyenne du Comice)

1 x Stella cherry tree (I already have 2 x Reginas)

2 x Hazel

2 x Hawthorn

2 x Sessile Oak

2 x Rowan

Shrubs

3 x honeysuckle

4 x holly

2 x wild rose

2 x dog rose

We have a lot of trees and shrubs in our garden but not many to be overly excited about. The Elder trees are extremely important and can be used by us, as well as the wildlife. We have some crab apple trees that haven't done too well the last two years we have lived here but last Spring was quite dry and windy so it might have affected the blossoming. Other trees did poorly last year also. We have lots of tall conifers (I think Leyland Cypress) which are great for privacy and wind protection as we are quite high and there is a (lightly used) lane running behind our garden. The view would be fabulous without them but I have to thank them for giving me an extremely sheltered area to grow food. There are lots of gaps and dead trees (conifers that were severely pruned before we came along) to one side of the garden and this is where I am concentrating on. I want to create a mixed native hedge that is good for wildlife. We have contoneaster in the front garden which supplies the bees with flowers in the summer and then produces berries in the winter that are very popular with blackbirds.

Soft Fruit

10 x Glen Ample raspberry canes (I already have 2 x Autumn Bliss)

10 x Elsanta strawberry crowns

1 x rhubarb

Vegetable Seeds/Tubers

Potatoes - Miranda for first earlies and Pink Fir Apple for maincrop

Tomato - Kalavrita

Spring onion - Ishikura Bunching

Parsnip - Javelin F1

Carrot - Chantenay Red Cored

Kale - Nero di Toscano

Courgette - Nero di Milano

Jerusalem Artichokes

Cucumber - Passandra F1

I already have garlic, broad beans and purple sprouting broccoli growing. 

My existing seed collection contains:

Leek - Solaise Blue

Pak choi - F1 Rubi and F1 Yuushou

Peas - Sugar Snap and Irish Green Pea

Carrot - Rodelika and Autumn King. I wasn't impressed with the flavour of my carrots this year so I am changing variety

Tomato - Sungold

Lettuce - Baby Gem and Mizuna

Beetroot - Detroit Globe 

Squash - no idea of variety, I harvested the seeds from a squash I bought at our local farm stall.

New Zealand Spinach - this was a staple of our meals all through the summer, autumn and early winter, until the frost killed it. It will grow as a perennial in mild climates. It is a very fleshy leaf that has to be cooked before eating as it contains oxalic acid. The reason I chose it over standard spinach that can be eaten raw is that it is the one spinach variety I can buy that is bred in Ireland, by Brown Envelope Seeds. Sacrifices for keeping it local!

So I have a lot of work ahead of me this year. I have been gardening long enough to know just how much work is involved in growing a wide range of vegetables. I won't be planting everything at the same time. I think I'll keep the details of the sowing times I have in mind for another post.

Grow Write Guild #2 My Dream Garden

* Read about the Grow Write Guild writing prompts here.

My dream garden is lush and moist and has many canopies. There is very little manicured grass. It is on an incline, with rocky parts, and some scattered small flat areas. There are lots of native Irish trees and a massive Scots Pine. There are other Scots Pines in the neighbouring lands, which are not my responsibility, but they are teeming with red squirrels, which will visit my garden on occasion. It is a place of refuge for the local wildlife but the variety of species keeps a healthy balance in the garden. I don’t kill the slugs but the resident thrushes help to keep their numbers down. The nasturtiums give me a place to relocate the caterpillars that I have removed from the broccoli. My two cats take care of any rats or mice that come close to the house.This garden is difficult to cultivate certain plants on, but is nonetheless lush with beautiful growth. There is enough space for containers to widen my choices. It is not an easy terrain designed by a human but a landscape cut out by time and weather. I have a small glasshouse that I have crammed with healthy flowers, vegetables, fruit and herbs. There is a sheltered area which is a suntrap and completely private. I have a bench here. I have a small patio area just outside my back door which has some chairs and a small table. Apart from these little areas of space for human use, it is beautifully wild. A small stream runs down the incline just inside the outermost boundary of one side of the property. The sounds of nature are loud.

Grow Write Guild #1 My First Plant

* Read about the Grow Write Guild writing prompts here.

My first plant was a 35 year old cactus that was gifted to me by my father, a relic of my grandmother’s decades spanning collection. It was akin to adopting an adult in the place of a child - an imposing specimen, unmoving and deadly to the touch. In fact I once accidentally drove one of the spikes through my fingernail and had to patiently allow my nail to slowly grow to a sufficient length to allow me to cut the spike away. The reason for enduring this injury-afflicting plant on my kitchen windowsill, always threatening to harm me with a misplaced brush of my hand, was that once a year, around April, it would bloom an incredible large white and pale pink heavily scented flower, seemingly out of nothing. The flower would last a day, delighting my olfactory system while washing the dishes, and then turn flaccid and withered where upon I would carefully pluck it from the cactus and throw it in the compost. The cactus would also regularly sprout baby cacti from its motherboard and I could remove and pot them on. They made wonderful gifts, whether people wanted them or not and if you are reading this story, I would wager that you have been the lucky recipient of one in the past.

Garden Writing Challenge

I've always been drawn to writing. I will never avoid a chance to consciously communicate with the written word, whether it's something as simple as a grammatically correct text message, as technical as proof reading CVs for my family or as indulgent as long contemplative emails to long distance friends. But right now I am looking for something more creative and intense and direct - a step above blog posts about my home and garden. My kitchen table is inviting though messy, I have a nice lamp, a map of my local Cork harbour and a my much loved globe. The stove is lighting regularly and I am extremely comfortable.

I started searching for garden writing prompts and found a perfect challenge - the Grow Write Guild challenge on a wonderful looking website You Grow Girl. The challenge is a few years old now but each post has loads of comments and links to other gardening blogs. So I've started writing little stories built around the prompts and am hoping to post one every week here. Hopefully some of you will join in too or add links to similar challenges in the comments.

Garden Diary: 26th October 2020

 My outdoor nursery looks like this:

It contains mainly flowers with lots of calendula and wallflowers in red, white and purple:

I have pak choi in pots:

Because the ones I put in the ground ended up like this:

The vegetable plot looks like this at the moment:

We are eating spinach, carrots, various herbs and leeks:

The leeks are not as long as I'd hoped, I obviously didn't earth them up as much as I should have.

My purple sprouting broccoli was decimated by the caterpillars of the White butterfly but they have come back nicely so I am hopeful of a harvest:

This week I've planted some of my garlic, Iberian Wright and Messidrome. This patch was previously used for peas, and I've been adding seaweed and compost from emptied pots since the peas were removed. The soil is looking really nice, with tons of earthworms. Garlic is a hungry plant. I still have quite a bit to plant. I won't do it all together, but will interplant among all the beds. I find a polyculture bed, which mixes varieties of veg, herbs, fruits and flowers goes a long way to reduce pest damage, as it increases the likelyhood of the presence of predatory insects. It also looks great.

Getting ready:

In place:

Covered back over and fallen branches used to make a boundary so I know where to weed:

Covered with my own hay from my grass meadow:

 

And topped off with a thick layer of seaweed. This will protect the soil and prevent it from washing away and leeching minerals. It will also decompose slowly adding organic matter to the soil.

I've also planted some broad beans in two different beds. I had great success with my beans this year, not least because of the hard work I put into them.

In the front garden I have done a lot of work which is completely unseen at this stage. I have planted loads of spring bulbs and wildflower seeds and will let the grass grow long around them. I have also made a little structure using stones and soil and have planted a little cutting of campanula. Here is what it looks like presently, but I am anticipating success by next spring/summer:

And that's all folks. Till next time..

Garden Diary: 4th October 2020

 Really need to do this more often...

Final tomatoes are ripening on the plant in the sunny porch. I am very happy with my harvest this year considering I only planted my seeds at the end of May. It was not by choice as seeds were hard to come by, but it was much easier than planting on a propagating mat in February and minding them like babies for months. The most satisfying thing about the tomatoes was having enough ripe ones, all at the same time, to bring a little lunchbox full when visiting my family. I grew sungold this year, which are nice, but next year I want to do big red lumpy tomatoes and forego the cherries.

I grew a very flamboyant carrot! The variety is Autumn King and they are very tasty. I also grew Rodelika, which I found to be a little soapy in taste, but still palatable and they gave me nice long carrots.  Bonus points for the Rodelika is that they came from organically grown Irish seeds (Brown Envelope Seeds) and I think origin is as important as taste. I planted far too few carrots however. I took my time preparing the ground before sowing (although the photo would say otherwise) but totally underestimated how many carrots we consume. I don't like to completely plant a bed full of the one crop, and rather mix all types of plants together. This reduces pest and disease but leads me to underplant as it is more difficult to keep track of what you are planting, and you end up losing crops to shade from overhanging vegetables. Better design is needed next year.

I am happy with my leeks. I make sure to earth them up regularly and applied plenty of seaweed. They took a battering in one of the storms but have much recovered, since taking this photo. They look spectacular on a frosty day so I am not dreading the winter at all, thinking about how they will look. 

I planted a mix of salad leaves, mizuna, little gem and both a green and a red variety of pak choi, at the end of August, and they are doing excellent. I've been pulling leaves off for my sandwiches and burgers and am not getting slug damage. I use no pellets or pesticides of any sort.

I've preserved my cooking apples and beetroot into various jars including spiced apply chutney, apple sauce, beetroot and apple chutney and pickled beetroot. This is really the main reason I grow fruit and veg. I love relishes and chutneys and anything vinegary. I've lots of recipes under the Preserving/Canning tab at the top of the page.

A lot of my energy is now going into growing flowers for next year. In the last month I have sown lots of wildflowers (poppies, cornflower, calendula, yellow rattle, scabious...) among my grass. I have also sown sweet peas, Californian poppies, delphiniums, black eyed Susan, verbena, wallflowers and others in pots and will overwinter in my porch. I really have to get a table as I will not have enough floor space. I've lots of spring bulbs planted in the ground and in pots and cannot wait to see how they look as I really tried to create designful combinations. It's hard when you are arranging bulbs and trying to envision them as flowers. So exciting and full of expectations though.

That's the most of it. I am awaiting my delivery of seed garlic and onions and have a bed prepared for them. I am also anticipating bare root tree season so I can add about 10 trees to the garden, a mix of fruit and native including but not limited to hazel, hawthorn, pear, cherry and apple.

Till next time (hopefully within a month!)

Garden Diary: 23rd July 2020

Today is a beautiful day. It rained last night but was dry when I rose, so it was nice to not have to worry about watering my outdoor plants. It got warmer and warmer to scorching at parts of the evening. I got a lot of gardening jobs done, plus a walk to the beach while listening to my current favourite podcast Permaculture Voices.

Indoor plants did need watering. Here is the current condition of my porch:

My tomatoes are doing great. The variety is Sungold and I received the seeds for free from a GIY Ireland project. They were only planted at the end of May and are just starting to set fruit. I'll start feeding them now, once a week. I've bought a bottle of tomato feed and they are the only crop that I will feed with a shop bought fertiliser. Everything in the garden is sustained with homemade compost, locally collected seaweed mulch, chopped up pea and bean pods, and a liquid feed I made from steeping perennial weeds in water.

Also in the porch is the garlic I harvested today:

It is a small harvest but I'm amazed that I got any garlic at all. I planted it much too late (end of March I think) and used poor quality seed garlic. I'll be very disappointed with myself if I don't have a big harvest next year. I'll be aiming for about 40 heads, with some of that to be kept as seed for the following year. My aim is to slowly become self sufficient with my seeds.

Speaking of seed saving, so far this year I have saved seed from chives, lupins, delphiniums, scots pine tree, and poppies. I have them stored in a biscuit tin in the fridge, in labelled white envelopes. I'm hoping to add as many flowers as I can, including calendula and sunflower, as I have a lot of room to fill in the front garden.

A major job today was digging a large hole so I could move a cherry tree from a pot into the ground. The variety is Regina. I have two and must transplant the second one soon. First the blister on my thumb must heal... I put a layer of seaweed in the bottom of the hole and mixed in fresh compost with the existing compost in the pot and garden soil.

This morning I threw together a few flowers for the vase on the kitchen window, a collection which I named Rise and Shine (Calendula Indian Prince, Californian poppy and yarrow):

We've been eating plenty of delicious Queen's potatoes. I wish I'd planted twice as much.

Also lots of peas, courgettes and the odd carrot:

And that's pretty much it for today. Till next time!