First day in the garden!

I finally got around to cleaning the strawberry box. I dug out all the strawberry plants, threw away a lot of mint and couch grass, applied hot water from the hose in the hope of killing-off some mint and grass, added a wheelbarrow-load of compost, and then planted four or five strawberry plants/squarefoot. A lot of the plants are a bit old and woody but with the extra space I can let runners root this summer and renew the plants that way.
The garlic has been emerging square by square for quite a while now. The white and purplish white bulbs came up first, but now even the little bulbils are up - it will be interesting to see how they do.
I sowed two squares of carrots, one Nantes and one the mixed coloured ones left from last year. I sowed them  on April 23rd and the soil seemed quite warm already.
I also took the potatoes out of the fridge and set them to sprout. They had stored very well in kitchen paper in ice-cream boxes, no mould at all.

Indoors I have done nothing really! I started parsnip seed on tissue paper on almost a week ago and some of those are sprouting and will need potting tomorrow.

Autumn round-up

As usual I have forgot to update this!

On Monday I planted the garlic ready for next year. The garlic actually did pretty well this year and I decided to try all four sorts again. In retrospect I pulled up the Icelandic purple variety way too early - I noticed that it did not appear in the farm shop until almost a month after I harvested mine so I probably lost some growth there. In the chart below the Purplish white variety is what I grew on as a one year-old last year i.e. last autumn I replanted round, undivided, bulbs. The White variety did best of all and had very large cloves so it is certainly worth growing, and I think the Purplish white one will be as good next year. The Italian one only had very small cloves and I was surprised to find that although the bulb looks white, each clove is a rub red colour. Perhaps it will do better next summer. I planted 9 cloves in each square.
Some of the garlic had scapes and I let them develop. I saved a couple and scattered the bulbils in one square. From what I have read they take a couple of years to grow full-sized but after that they can be very good producers. Could be fun to see how they do.
The shallots did not do great this year so I decided to try them with autumn planting too - if they do not look good in the spring then I can just pull them up. I think I planted one square of each type which I bought in the spring, 5 per square.
I dug up the potatoes from the extra box of molta - they are small but very tasty. I put the molta into the veg boxes and added the usual seaweed and hen manure before planting the garlic.

Bulbils			Shallots (round)
Purplish white			Shallots
White
Red Italian	Icelandic purple	White	Purplish white

Wet summer!

Really! Was it summer at all?
A quick run through what happened... a new cat on the block decided that the veg boxes made perfect cat toilets :-( so the few carrots which struggled to germinate were decimated by digging. No carrots at all from the usual sowing period. The "carrot week" ones did rather better and I have a few nice carrots from them. They are Rainbow carrots so not quite as vigorous as normal orange ones, still, better than nothing.
The parsnips which I started indoors look fantastic! At any rate the leaves do, I have not pulled any up yet. The parsnips which I sowed as normal have hardly grown at all so I think this indoor method is the way to go in the future - assuming that it is not all top-growth.
I dug all the French La Ratte potatoes today, we had a couple of meals previously. the tops were being eaten to death by slugs so it seemed wise to get them up and out. Got about 2 kg all told which is pretty good from two squares. The adjacent Premiers are looking good but I left them in for now.
Beans... hmm, well it really was not warm enough when I put them out and the French ones died back. The summer was cold and wet and not a good one for beans. It looks as though there are a few broadbeans and two Borlotti!
The leeks are doing OK, all things considered. I did not thin them properly so perhaps they would be bigger if I had. Worth trying again next year. Same with the onions from seeds, they grew at least large enough to eat.
The shallots did OK, not huge but use-able. They had onion thrips when I took them up.
The Italian kale grew but I never actually used it! Kept waiting for it to get bigger. The broccoli had heads but did not do very well. 
The garlic was pretty successful. Both the cloves saved from last year and the 2nd year bulbs grew nicely. The purple ones from Frú Lauga did not do much - I may have pulled them up too early though, they may be a later variety. The soft neck from Italy did not make very big bulbs, they look as though they have divided but not grown much. May stick some of those back in later.
The rhubarb did very well, I took three small crops off it and it grew all summer. The strawberries suffered from lack of sun. I just picked the redcurrants and got about 600 g of those plus a handful of white currants.
There is a plague of slugs now, munching the potato grass and the last few strawberries.

Carrot Week!

This year SquareFoot Gardening has added a twist to Carrot Week. Instead of sowing Nantes carrots we are sowing any coloured ones. I chose Rainbow F1 from Johnsons. They are Nantes carrots but in various shades of white-yellow-orange.
Past experience shows that Carrot Week is too early for Iceland but you never can tell what the weather will be like. I sowed one square as usual, and one square of pre-soaked seed. All I did was station three seed together on kitchen-roll, covered with another sheet and then wet the whole lot over night. Then today I snipped the groups of seed off and placed them on the prepared bed. Actually, thinking about it, someone once suggested that you could just bury the whole sheet of paper.
If there is any difference in speed of germination then I may try that next.

I also re-potted some more of the indoor seeds. I also re-potted the cucumber plants... I have not been treating them very well, and let them dry out once. I noticed that they have some flowers, tiny cucumbers even, and I am not sure if this is a good thing or a sign that they are stressed. Anyhow, they should feel better in bigger pots.

Three of the purple garlic are now showing their tips. Perhaps that is why the garlic lady grows this sort, because  they come up late? The strongest growers are the one-year old bulbs but the rest look OK too.

Happy Summer!

Thursday was the first day of summer and certainly it is sunny but not terribly warm yet (7°C or less).
Ómar's mother gave me some chitted potatoes yesterday and told me to get them planted so I did! I added some leftover chicken manure and then decided I might as well get the carrots sown too. So I bought a bag of mushroom compost, a container of chicken manure, and one of dried seaweed. I put a handful of each in very square before sowing the carrot seed - see below. I added one square of spring onion seed too and there is a blank square left.




The garlic is looking pretty good now. I put some fertilizer round it today and covered it up again. Here is a picture of how it looks, and one of the potatoes before I planted them. Quite a mixture of potatoes, some I bought last autumn and kept in the fridge, the others are some French ones which I allowed to sprout a little.