Plant Garlic - It's so Easy to Grow

I love using garlic in cooking and it is really easy to grow your own. Heads of garlic for planting can be obtained from garden centres and mail order catalogues. You can get garlic for free by planting supermarket bulbs but the crop won't be as good. Split the garlic heads into individual cloves and plant these about 2 inches deep and 6 inches apart. Plant a bit deeper in light soils but if your soil if heavy and poorly drained you will need to plant about 1 inch deep on a bed of coarse sand and potting compost. Once planted just leave it to grow, weeding when necessary and watering in dry spells in spring and summer. You can plant the cloves in stages between now and February (depending on soil and weather conditions) which will give a harvest between June and August.
Lift when the leaves start to turn yellow and bend at the stem. Dry outside for about 7-10 days if the weather is fine and dry, otherwise dry in a well ventilated greenhouse. Store in hanging bunches or plaits so that air can circulate the bulbs.
If you don't have room in the garden to grow garlic, grow it in pots as it is shallow rooting and well suited to container growing.

Revamped Front Garden

Just finished smartening up the front garden and I'm very pleased with the result. This area was difficult to keep weed free and never really looked tidy, which is important in the front garden, so I decided to put down some weed suppressant material and cover it with green slate.
This will keep the ground weed free while letting the rainwater soak through.
It was quite hard physical work but I enjoyed it. First I needed to prepare the area by removing all plant material. Also there were bulbs planted in this area which I managed to locate by referring to previous photographs. These have been replanted in pots and borders in the rear garden. The ground was then raked and firmed by treading it flat.
I was lucky enough to get a roll of weed suppressant material in a local DIY sale. There was enough to cover the area with a fair bit left over. The green slate was purchased in 25 kilogram bags and it took 10 bags in total to cover all the material. The roses which were planted in the border along the fence have been pruned back and moved to the rear garden. I've replaced them with five lavender bushes - these were grown from cuttings which I took earlier this year. They should make a lovely fragrant low growing hedge to border my new garden. There are still some herbaceous perennial geraniums and sedum spectabile at the top of the garden near the wall and primulas have been planted in a narrow border along the path. Long stone troughs have been planted with violas and a couple of other pots contain small shrubs and bulbs to add a bit of interest.
I am so glad to have finished this before the winter. It was a job I had planned to do next spring but the weather has been so nice and unseasonably warm that it seemed a shame to waste the opportunity.

Forcing Bulbs for Indoor Display

Now is the time of year to think about buying prepared bulbs for early flowering indoors. Specially treated bulbs are available in garden centres. These are best for winter forcing as they will have been well grown, lifted at the right time and thoroughly dried to prevent disease or premature rooting. They will also have been stored at a carefully controlled temperature to induce proper development of the flower buds inside the bulb for flowering at the desired time.
Plant your bulbs in a correctly balanced compost such as John Innes No.2 or use bulb fibre which is cleaner and easier to handle. Both these growing mediums can be used in glazed bowls with no drainage holes. Place a layer of damp compost or moistened fibre in the bowl. Set the bulbs as close as possible. Fill the spaces with compost or fibre. The noses of large bulbs such as hyacinth, daffodil or tulip can be left exposed but cover all other bulbs completely. The surface of the compost or fibre should be well below the rim of the bowl.
Put the bowl in a cool, dark place. Check every couple of weeks that the bowl has not dried out. Well dampened compost or fibre should not need more than an occasional watering, if any, during this stage. When the tips of the leaves are showing 1-2 inches high, move the bowl to a greenhouse, conservatory or windowsill of a cool room (about 10 degrees Celsius). When the leaves have grown to 4 inches high, the bowl can be moved to a warmer room (about 18 degrees Celsius).  Taller flowers such as hyacinth, daffodil or tulip may need support - place a cane in the pot and tie the stems with string.
My favourite bulb for growing indoors is the hyacinth which has a beautiful rich fragrance when it flowers. It is available in a range of colours but my favourite is the blue flowered variety. I always plant the bulbs out in the garden when they have finished flowering. Plant to a depth of about 6 inches. Bulbs grown in compost will usually flower again the following year, whereas those grown in fibre often take a year to recover.
Start growing your prepared hyacinth bulbs now and they should be flowering in the New Year.

Growing and Propagating Strawberries

I have grown strawberries in the vegetable patch in previous years but have always had a problem with slugs, so this year I decided to grow some in a hessian sack on the patio as well as some in the veg patch. The plants were set into the sack through slits cut in the sides. I put a bamboo cane into the compost to drape an old net curtain over. This is to protect the fruits from birds once they start to ripen. The plants in the veg patch were protected in a similar way. Both the veg patch plants and the ones in the hessian container produced a good crop of fruits, although the ones on the patio were much better protected from slug damage. I will grow some more like this next year.
I grow Cambridge Favourite which is a mid season variety producing a heavy crop with a decent flavour in mid summer.
The best fruits are produced from younger plants and strawberry plants will usually need replacing when they have fruited for 2-3 years. The easiest and cheapest way to do this is by propagating the runners which are produced from June onwards. I just peg them down into loose soil and when they are well rooted detach them from the parent plant and grow them on in pots overwintered in the cold frame or greenhouse. Strawberries grow best in soil rich in humus so add some well rotted compost to your strawberry patch to ensure a good crop.
Another type of strawberry which is just as easy to grow is the Alpine Strawberry. This type does not produce runners so must be grown from seed. I have grown a variety called Baron Solemacher in the past which is a vigorous heavy cropper carrying the fruits higher on the plants, meaning less chance of slug damage. The fruits are much smaller but very aromatic and sweet, lovely in a dish with some ice cream. The alpine strawberries can self seed and be a bit invasive but are easy to control by simply weeding out any unwanted plants.

Bumper Harvest

It has been a great year for my veg. I have frozen bags and bags of runner beans and carrots, pickled jars and jars of beetroot, stored a large sack of potatoes and the winter leeks and curly kale are growing strongly in the veg patch. Provided we don't get a repeat of the severe cold weather we experienced last year, the winter veg look like producing a good crop. I'm going to be well fed and healthy this winter!
The weather conditions this year have resulted in a bumper fruit harvest as well and, even though I do not grow any fruit trees myself, I have been lucky enough to have been given a lot of fruit. The plums I received were eaten very quickly, and very nice they were too. The apples and pears have been sliced, tossed in demerera sugar, topped with a crumble mix and put into foil containers in the freezer - more lovely food for the colder months.
I am seriously considering growing my own apple and pear trees but I haven't got a lot space in the garden for more trees. I am therefore looking at the possibility of growing them on dwarfing rootstock in pots or fan training them against the fence. 

Roses - a brief history

Roses have been around for thousands of years - they were painted on palace walls in Ancient Crete in 1600 BC and a thousand years later were portrayed on tombs in Egypt. The Greeks called roses the 'Queen of Flowers' and were the first to grow them in gardens and pots throughout the land. The Romans used them in food, wine, perfumes and medicine and are believed to have introduced them into Britain. In 1500 there were three types of roses grown in the Tudor garden - the red rose (Rosa Gallica), the white rose (Rosa Alba) and the fragrant Damask Rose. The globular and fragrant Centifolia or Cabbage Rose arrived from Europe in about 1550. This was followed by the Austrian Yellow which came to Britain from Persia via Vienna in 1580. The Musk Rose arrived around the same time from the Himalayas. These ancient garden roses only flowered once in a season, were limited in colour, globular in shape and spreading in habit.

The first China Roses arrived in Europe in the 18th century, followed many years later by the delicate oriental Tea Roses. Our modern roses evolved through the crossing of the repeat flowering China Roses and the beautiful flowered Tea Roses with our own frost hardy robust varieties. In the 1860s Rosa Multiflora was introduced from Japan. This wild rambler, with its small plain white flowers in large heads, became the parent of some of our ramblers and all of our floribundas.

For sheer beauty and variety roses are hard to beat. There are many different types of roses so everyone should be able to grow them, even if it is just a patio rose in a pot or window box. My father loved roses and grew mainly the hybrid tea variety. I prefer floribunda roses which mix nicely in the border with other flowering shrubs and perennials. One of my favourites is Iceberg which has lovely white flowers and is often used as a hedging rose. Another is Irish Wonder, a reliable prolific flowerer producing large trusses of beautiful red roses. Arthur Bell is a lovely fragrant yellow rose with large weather resistant flowers. It flowers early in the season and continues well into the autumn. Another very fragrant variety is Romance which grows taller than the others and produces large deep pink flowers. Summer just wouldn't feel right without roses in the garden and I can't imagine ever having a garden without them.

Lovely Home Grown Veg

The runner bean crop has been really good this year and I am busily picking beautiful long bean pods every day. Those that I cannot eat immediately will be frozen to give me a good supply of home grown veg in the coming months. Runner beans are easy to freeze - just prepare them as if you were going to cook them, plunge them into a pan of boiling water for a couple of minutes to blanch them, then drain and rinse them in cold water and bag them up for freezing.
The last of the potatoes were lifted today and stored in a hessian sack in the pantry. Even though the weather has been very dry during the growing season the crop has been pretty good and should last me a while.

The beetroot crop has also been good this year but it is usually a reliable crop. I always plant 'Boltardy' and it has never produced a poor crop yet no matter what the weather is like,
I boil up the smaller beets to eat with salad, cooking and pickling the larger ones to store and use throughout the winter months. I find that using a solution of roughly three parts Sarsons pickling vinegar to one part water produces the best results