storing sunshine

Picking fresh greens and rushing them to the table is great. Eating a sun ripened plum straight from the tree is wonderful. But there is a deep satisfaction in putting stuff away for the winter that seems to come from another place and time.  It feels like the right thing to be doing at this time of year. The afternoons are full of sunshine and lazy wasps, but there's a faint tang of autumn in the early morning air. This is our busiest time at work, so I try to find something gentle and interesting to show the visitors in the midst of all the craziness - I recently spent a couple of happy afternoons making these pretty things...

A cold March and a hot July produced a bumper crop of shallots and garlic this year.
 They have been drying off on trays in the shed, and now they're ready to clean and store. 

Making strings and plaits to hang in a cool, dark shed is the traditional way to store the crop.
 Plenty of air circulation to prevent mould, and well away from any passing nibblers.
 They can be bought into the kitchen one at a time, and should last well into next year.
(I wanted to take more process pictures but it would have required growing an extra arm).

I use raffia to make a loop to string the shallots,

and to tie three garlic heads together to start my plaits.

Pretty and practical - perfect!

my steamy valentine

A great big pile of steaming horse hockey may not be every girl's dream Valentine but I was quite excited by today’s delivery.  Next week I am tasked with building a hotbed and the pile of fresh, (has to be fresh to generate heat), strawy stable manure will be the base for the frame.  It’s a traditional, low tech way of producing undersoil heating to get an early start on seed sowing.  More of all that next week – just wanted to share my excitement and whet your appetites. (Bleurgh!)

I’ll let you into a little secret – I don’t own the garden! (Just in case you were thinking I was a fabulously wealthy landowner with a penchant for historical recreation in my garden).  My employer doesn’t want to be identified – this might also be the moment to say that all views expressed in this blog are my own and not those of… blah bla blah etc

Yesterday the soil had dried out enough for me to prepare a planting area for some shallots and garlic.  I raked the bed out, top dressed it with a bit of bonemeal then planted 3 rows of garlic ‘Solent Wight’ and 3 rows of shallot ‘Golden Gourmet'.

nice fat garlic cloves

shallot 'Golden Gourmet'

The shallots are just snuggled down into the soil with their noses peeking out – I cover them up with a few pea sticks to try and foil the pigeons who like to tweak them out and hurl them about for sport.  The garlic goes in a bit deeper – I use a stick as a dibber to make holes to drop the cloves into; pushing them in can bruise the clove or damage the root plate.  Plant the fattest cloves and the biggest shallots you can get hold of to produce a generous crop for harvest in July.

happiness is a full seed box

More seeds arrived today - that’s nearly everything that I ordered.  There’s a few of the more arcane things left to come from Thomas Etty. I do have moments where I think I should alphabetise my seed box – but I think maybe that’s a guy thing (correct me if I’m wrong).  It’s as much as I can do to keep all my cabbagey things together without having them filed under ‘k’ for kale, ‘c’ for collard greens and ‘b’ for broccoli. Also does corn salad go under ‘c’ for corn, ‘s’ for salad or ‘l’ for lambs lettuce?  See!?! – Bored with it already! 

The other very exciting thing that arrived today was the shallots and garlic – Yay!  In spite the old adage to ‘plant on the shortest day - harvest on the longest day’, I usually get mine in some time in early February.  They need a long growing season with a good cold spell at the beginning, which helps the bulbs split and form a proper head.

The garlic is ‘Solent Wight’, a softneck variety that reliably produces good size heads and stores really well, and the shallots are ‘Golden Gourmet’. It’s worth getting your garlic from a garden centre or mail order – planting stuff from the supermarket means you’ll be growing varieties that prefer hotter climates.  The varieties with Isle of Wight names are better adapted to our cooler, shorter growing season.

After harvesting in late July, I like to plait the garlic and string the shallots, which makes them look very fancy, (but it’s easy when someone shows you – I’ll teach you some time).  Hanging them up in a cool shed is the best way to store them. I know some people like to put them in old tights instead of stringing them -  now I’m no Martha Stewart, but I don’t wear tights, and even if I did I wouldn’t want my old ones hanging up in the kitchen with onions in them!