What a difference a year makes!

After another weekend working hard in the garden, it looks very different again. Ryan was working on Saturday, so I spent the morning outside. The first thing I did was erect my new raised bed cover, which would have been easier had it not been a bit breezy! But I got there in the end. It’s basically a plastic cold frame that fits over the top of my raised beds. It has nice long anchor pegs to hold it down, and is now being used to harden off plants before they go outside, and protect my brassica seedlings (I bought Flower Sprouts and Purple Sprouting broccoli from the garden centre; now I have to spend the summer protecting them from every pest in the known universe!).

Remember those heady days at school, when you were faced with choosing your subject options, or which courses – at which higher education establishments – to apply for? There were a lot of things to consider, lots of differing advice on hand, and the prospect of making decisions that would affect (you were told) the rest of your life.

Although August is the height of the summer, and it’s worthwhile taking time to stop and smell the roses, the vegetable gardener also has to be aware that autumn is just around the corner. That doesn’t have to be a depressing thought! It just means you need to harvest any crops that won’t survive the first frosts, and that you may want to preserve some so that you can have a homegrown taste of summer during the winter months. You should have some new crops on the way to look forward to, and be thinking about potting up herbs to bring under cover for the winter.

One of the nerdy things I enjoy doing in my spare time is researching the first seeds to have made it into space. This is what I have found so far:

A little while ago I was talking about the recent extended period in my life when, for a variety of reasons, I was unable to garden. As it happens, I have been reading The Resilient Gardener, by Carol Deppe, which is subtitled “Food production and self-reliance in uncertain times”.

A seed potato is a potato that has been grown to be replanted to produce a potato crop. It’s the usual way that potatoes are made available to farmers and growers – although it is possible to produce potato seeds (also known as True Potato Seed, TPS), it is unusual to do so.

Header image: Terrae Novae destinations: Mars. Credit: ESA–Olivier Pâques

It’s time to shake the mud of 2016 off our boots, and to prepare the soil for 2017 (metaphorically speaking). I have the bones of a planting plan for next year, which will be subject to revisions, and we know which areas of the garden still need work.

If October starts warm it can provide a nice breathing space, to catch up late harvesting, saving seeds and generally getting the garden ready for the winter. It’s also the time to cover any bare soil, with mulches if necessary, to protect your soil structure from bad weather, and to ensure any tall plants (mainly brassicas) are staked against ‘wind rock’, which can lift their roots out of the soil. You may also need to net brassicas to stop them being munched by marauding pigeons.

Ah, April, a month that gives us leaves on the trees, blossom in the hedgerow, and a headache with its changeable weather. We gardeners would love April to be a season of sunshine and soft showers. But, instead, we need to plan for sleet and hail, or even snow. As the effects of climate change are felt more widely, we may even need to forego thinking of April as a rainy month at all, and just an extension of dry winters. It’s also at least a month before we can be relatively sure that there will be no more frosts.

As I said, one of my aims for this year is to streamline my gardening library a little bit – not a drastic chopping back, just a little light pruning to keep the shape

It has been rare this winter for free time, spare energy and decent weather to all come at once. Yesterday Ryan and I had a day off in the sunshine, so we made as much progress in the garden as we could (bearing in mind it is still waterlogged!).