Overwintering alliums 2016: garlic and onions

It’s raining heavily today, so there’s no point even trying to go outside into the garden, but if there’s a plus point to such dreadful weather then it does – at least temporarily – make people aware of what’s under their feet. Soil tends to be forgotten until it turns into mud, or you squelch along through sodden grass, or watch priceless fertility washed down the drain. Weather like this shows us the importance of winter soil care, particularly keeping soil covered (even if all you have is weeds!) so that plant roots can hold it all together for you.

We’ve all been there. We’ve all read the marketing blurb for a shiny new plant variety, and decided that we had to have it. We may have been good, and waited for a few days, to be sure that we really had to have it, but we’ve all paid money for brand new plant varieties for the garden. And then we find out that they don’t quite live up to the hype. You don’t hear about ‘early adopters’ outside of the tech world, really, but that’s exactly what we are, and a certain amount of disappointment is inevitable.

If it’s the middle of winter and there’s nothing much going on in the vegetable garden, or you want some easy and ultra-fresh salad greens, or a rainy day project to help keep the kids occupied, then try growing mustard and cress!

Header image: Mizuna lettuce growing aboard the International Space Station before being harvested and frozen for return to Earth. Image credit: NASA 

My dad’s minimalistic and flexible (but delicious!) recipe for sage and onion stuffing.

When I set about blogging The Peat-Free Diet it was an experiment, an journey into the unknown. My aim was to provide gardeners who want to garden without the use of peat with the information they need to do so, and the book evolved into a gardening primer that assumed peat was not on the menu. My love of science made more of an appearance than I had anticipated and there are plenty of big words to cope with, but it is my hope that they are presented in such a way that they are not hard to swallow.

Yesterday I read that Trump adviser Myron Ebell, a climate change denier, thinks that the green movement is the greatest threat to freedom.

It’s a couple of days until the next stop on my virtual book tour, so it’s time to take off the pith helmet and put my feet up with a cup of tea and a biscuit. In a recent interview, I respond to a question I was asked about my favourite biscuit – which has to be Snickerdoodles. You can’t buy them, you have to make them, and they have nothing whatsoever to do with Snickers chocolate bars, or peanuts in general. They are a divine, spiced* biscuit (cookie) that’s very moreish and goes very nicely with a good cuppa.

Potting on

I used to do a lot of seed swapping, attending (and holding) seed swaps, and doing ad hoc swaps with gardening contacts, many of whom I met online. I used to quite enjoy making homemade seed packets, and did some lovely ones from old botanical illustrations. Understandably this faded into the background over the years that I was without a garden and establishing a new one. I’m also trying to be a lot more restrained in my seed acquisitions, since seeds don’t last forever and I have neither unlimited time nor space in which to grow them. Last year I went to a local seed swap only long enough to give them my excess seeds!

My parents are coming to visit today, to ‘see the garden’ (which is probably just a convenient excuse for them to visit). I am a little apprehensive – not least because it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop raining all day. We were going to have a barbecue; we’ve thought better of it.

The onion flatbreads I made earlier turned out to be absolutely divine. I said I have been honing my flatbread skills, but to be honest I use the Moro flatbread recipe and it’s a doddle. The hardest thing to remember is to start at least an hour before you want to eat them, as you have to give the dough time to rise.