Sunday 23 November 2008

Snow and garlic

Waking up to snow on the ground and a lovely combo of sleet, rain and more snow coming from the sky I though that a positive post might be in order to cheer me, and hopefully some of you, up.

Yesterday I finally succeeded in planting the 5 rows (8 bulbs) of garlic, I hadn't anticipated needing to dig quite so much earth but I really do love planting garlic, I love the fact that the bulbs look exactly the same as the ones you eat, and in fact last year they were the same bulbs. I love cracking them open and removing the cloves from the papery wrapping, and the fact that each clove will hopefully turn itself into a whole new bulb, but most of all it just feels great to be planting something at this time of year when everything else is dying back for winter.

We have had a couple of frosts already which are finally killing the nettles, yesterday's digging removed some major nettle roots, this is the only time of year you can make such progress, the nettles are weakened and for once not growing, and the ground it still dry enough to dig. Roughly dig over the area and the frosts will break the clods down into lovely crumbly soil for you.

At this time of year, with the months before spring stretching ahead of you, I am always hopeful that I will manage to get on top of the weeds and next spring will be all about planting new seedlings into clear fertile soil.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amen to digging up nettles. I let some of ours grow this year; really out of lazyness but under the guise of "it's good for wildlife" too.

Just out of interest - what variety of garlic do you grow? Ours was a bit musty last year but I don't know whether that's down to my air drying technique or the variety. Would be interested to find out!

Anonymous said...

Last year I grew "Tesco finest" but this year I am doing it properly with "Solent wight", "Purple wight", and two others which I will have to look up. Hopefully I will find at leats one which likes my soil!

The Allotment Blogger said...

I'm growing both of those too - we can have a comparison test! We're down in Sussex with a clay soil ... and we're already doing an onion seed versus onion set type experiment on the return on costs for each kind of planting.

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