7 days, 7 harvests: no. 7

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China Central Television has produced a short video showing the plant experiments growing on the Tiangong space station. The Shenzhou-16 crew has been in orbit for almost three months, and says their space vegetable garden has given a good lettuce harvest.

Growing onions is a popular task for millions of gardeners and knowing when to harvest red onions – along with yellow and white varieties – is important for success. If you harvest onions too early, it means a limited storage life. But, harvesting too late could mean a split or rotten bulb. In this article, I’m going to review two perfect times for harvesting red onions. One is ideal for fresh use and the other is best for optimizing storage life.

Lavender is a lovely and popular flowering herb. The lavender I grow in my garden isLavandula angustifolia, also known as English Lavender. The variety I have is called Hidcote, which is a relatively compact lavender with deep purple flowers. Versatile and easy to grow, this lavender is a useful wildlife attractant on the sunny fringe of my forest garden.

Every month this year I’ve been trying to read one of the unread books on my shelf, and to then decide whether it gets to keep its spot or needs to be set free to find a new home. For June I chose Nature’s Wild Harvest by Eric Soothill and Michael J. Thomas. It was published in 1983, and has been sitting on my bookshelf for three years, since I bought it in our local secondhand bookshop (which only opens on Wednesdays).

Header image: Tokyo Bekana Chinese cabbage leaves prior to harvest aboard the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some statistics about the average UK garden size, and I found some interesting ones. According to the 2015 media pack for the RHS The Garden magazine, a document that is aimed at attracting advertisers to the publication, the 380,000 RHS members the magazine is sent to have gardens that are 10 times larger than the UK average, covering over half an acre.

I didn’t get outside much over Christmas, as the weather wasn’t really conducive to gardening and we were happy having some quiet time indoors. But as harvesting the oca and ulluco was long overdue, I went out to do it yesterday afternoon. The photo above shows what the bed looked like at the end of August. The oca were clearly happier than the the ulluco by this time; they were always more numerous in terms of actual plants, so they had 2/3 bed.

This is what the wild, self-seeded comfrey plant outside my front door looked like last week. It doesn’t look like that now, though, because I have cut it back and put the leaves to rot in one of my comfrey buckets (they have lids and taps). First, though, I had to empty out the last lot of comfrey liquid. I can’t remember when I made it – I don’t think it was last year, I think it must have been before that – and I harvested 3 litres of comfrey liquid from my pair of bucket. That’s certainly enough to keep my tomatoes and peppers happy this year!

Here in the UK it’s traditional to take a couple of weeks off work over the summer and head off to somewhere with better weather – or at least somewhere that you can get away from it all for a little while. It’s one of the ironies of life that this takes you away from the garden at a time when it really could use your help. If you have a gardening neighbour then you can rely on them to take care of your garden while you’re away, but if you don’t and don’t want to come home to dead plants, weeds and giant marrows then there are a few things you can do to prepare your garden for your absence.

Earlier this year I was absolutely horrified when the flat footed fence fitters trampled all over my wild garlic. It was just starting to leaf out, and I don’t know why the sudden garlic smell wafting up from their feet didn’t give them pause, but it didn’t!