Grow your own

 I love my garden but I am no gardener--  not that I have a black thumb, if I apply myself I get good results (my houseplants are looking good), I've just never committed.  I do have some big herb bushes - rosemary, sage - but I'd like more.  And someday I want a Meyer lemon tree  .

 ^ yes that happens every time I brush past the rosemary I have, it's a lovely scent

Fall to Fall is the time period for garlic, so plant in october and harvest in late august or early september. If you leave in the ground too long the cloves start to separate which makes for harder cleaning. The cloves should be planted about an inch deep.

Probably I would leave them in the ground, you can always dig one up in the fall and see what it looks like. I used to plant elephant garlic but found I did not like it that much except for roasting so i left it in the ground and now it just hangs around every year. I prefer hard neck garlic so that is what I grow. It does not keep as long as soft neck but to me it tastes a lot better and as a bonus when it produces scapes I cut them off and eat those. I harvest in the middle of August because the bulbs are nice and tight. I then let the garlic bed rest until October and then work some compost into it and select some nice bulbs and separate the cloves and replant

Dean wrote: timothy leary wrote: You think it does not require too much effort? Maybe because you are not much of a gardener. I'm not anything of a gardener - I'm an anti-gardener. I plant stuff, I look after it, water it on dry days, it grows, I eat it. I don't see that as effort - sure my veg bed is only 2m by 4m, it's raised so I don't have to bend down to dig and weed it and it's protected by nets to keep out pets and vermin - weeding is a few minutes work once a week - two watering cans of collected rain water each night if it hasn't rained that day and the job's done in less than 5 minutes. This year I grew salad leaves from seed sprinkled onto wet coir compost - in a week they were fresh shoots that could have been cropped and eaten there and then, a week later we were snipping off individual leaves to eat, some of the stronger ones were picked out and planted in the raised-bed to grow into mature plants - none of that was effort or required special "gardening" skills. Anything that requires too much effort is the law of diminishing returns. I used to grow potatoes direct into the ground but that is a complete waste of energy having to double-dig heavy clay soil and then spread manure into the trenches then having to dig them up a few months later for a few pounds of spuds - I can yield almost as much growing them in a plastic sack for considerably less work. It's the same with strawberries - growing them in containers is far less effort than growing them directly into the ground and they yield just as well, if not better. Anyone who thinks growing a few veg for the table requires a lot of effort is either doing it wrong or growing the wrong stuff. I got my daughter growing tomatoes and beans in a grow-bag at her London flat last year - all she did was water them every night and pick them when they were ripe - any more effort than that and she wouldn't have done it. I'm not a gardener at all - I'd rather sit back with a beer and watch stuff grow than spend all weekend "gardening".

Jim Garten wrote: So how about the ones planted in May? Waste of time, or will they just be smaller?

Not wanting to bash heads with, or contradict, Timothy Leary, but Stevenage isn't on the West Coast of the USA. Europe has two main varieties because of our climate - autumn and spring sown - most 'Isle of Wight' varieties are ideal for UK growing obviously. In the UK late cropping garlic planted in May will not be as successful as autumn sown vatieties but they will produce good bulbs fit for the table. May is a little late, but the weather this year hasn't been that good so being late is probably beneficial - you should be able to harvest them any time now if you want "wet" bulbs or leave them until the leaves start to turn yellow if you want "dry". Dig them up and remove all but an 1" of stalk, then either hang them to dry or leave them on a wooden table with plenty of circualtion.

Edited by Dean - July 01 2012 at 05:11

timothy leary wrote: ^ Strawberries are shallow rooted and two inches of topsoil is enough to grow them. We get a good yield after letting mother plants produce 3 runners. This insures we always have strawberries. As for the garlic you are right I am not in england so it is best for Jim to follow english advice. I still believe nature knows best and plants do better in the ground than in containers. Take a houseplant outside in the spring and if the pot has drain holes in the fall you will have to rip it out of the ground. Container gardening can be successful for those with limited space or for those who do not want to work too hard at gardening.

I have to admit I'm mystified by the agro(culture) here: You grow stawberries, I grow strawberries; you grow them in dirt, I grow them in dirt; you allow a couple of runners to propagate new plants, I allow a couple of runners to propagate new plants; you harvest strawberries, I harvest strawberries. I really don't see what the big deal is that I grow them in a strawberry pot on my patio while you grow them in strawberry beds (undoubtedly protected by straw or organic strawberry mulch mats). An inch of top soil is fine for strawberries- the abundance of wild strawberries that grow as weeds in my garden are testament to that, but pots are easier for me, digging is not a pastime I enjoy (and since a hernia operation 3 years ago, not a pastime I can spend too much time doing anymore, not that I was ever that encouraged to do much before). In the UK we have a hosepipe ban, (yep - national flooding and we have water restrictions) which means that I have to water everything manually using a watering can - two gallons at time - watering a few pots requires much less water than watering acres of beds and vegetable plots. Fortunately I have an efficient rainwater collection system that can nett 90 gallons an hour during a good storm and a 1500 gallon underground tank to store it in, but I still can't use a hosepipe or automated sprinkler system to water my garden. If climate change is a reality and the population continues to grow we have to be more efficient at growing stuff, using less resources and less water - we have to be better than nature. 

Question on a completely different subject - for the last few years, I have been guaranteed a good crop of cherries by this time of the year; only have the one tree in our garden, but this has produced anything from 15/20 pounds of fruit previously.

This year though, virtually nothing. Even taking into account avian & squirrel theft, this year's crop is appalling - I suspect this is due to the hot spell of weather in Early March, followed by torrential rain just after the tree (which we call Geoffrey, after the late great Geoff Hamilton who died just before we planted it) flowered. So, just wondering...

1 - any other cherry tree owners in the UK having a similar lack of fruit?

2 - is this just cherries, or have other soft fruit garden crops been affected?

The strawberries in my garden aren't very tasty. Planted a cherry tree this year.