While my gardening view from the potting shed is filling out, inside there’s suddenly a lot more space. The dahlias are now permanently outside, although not into the borders yet, and most of the seedlings are planted out.
A few wet days left me unable to weed so I used the time to have a tidy up. It’s looking a lot better. Wonder how long that will last?
What is really different is the smell. There’s a distinct odour of allium in the potting shed. I’ve dug up the Japanese onions and am drying those.
They’re not very big – a combination of my soil and the lack of rain we’ve had. However, for a first-time crop they’ve done ok and I will probably grow them again. The advantage of these over other onions is that they grow over the winter so are earlier to harvest. It also means the ground can be used for something else. I’ve got my eye on that patch for the dahlias, which I grow for cutting.
The onions alone would not be enough to scent the air but the potting shed is also the temporary home of the garlic. This has been harvested far earlier than I would have liked because rust struck.
So, I’ve cut off all the diseased foliage and got rid of it – not the thing to put on the compost.
The cloves are nowhere near as big as they should be and I’m not sure they will store very well. We eat a lot of garlic though so that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. So far, the nearby red onions seem to have escaped and I’m leaving them for a bit longer to see if they will grow bigger before I harvest them.
I will make sure I plant any members of the allium family – onions, shallots, garlic, leeks – well away from that bed for the next few years.
More successful are the broad beans and we’ve already picked lots with even more to come. It’s now a bit of a race to eat them before they become too big.
The cutting bed is beginning to produce flowers for the house. I’ve already picked the first sweet Williams and the Euphorbia oblongata I sowed a couple of years ago is performing well.
I got the seeds from Sarah Raven who advises treating it as an annual. I missed pulling some plants up at the end of the first year of growing it and it performed last year with no problem. Eventually, I will probably have to replace the plants but for now it’s fine.
Meanwhile, the rest of the cutting bed has been filled with things grown from seed this year, many of them part of my gardening trials. It’ll be interesting to see how they fare.
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