scatty harvest

My brain is a little absent at present. I feel a bit ‘out to lunch’. My brother is getting married next week and there are quite a few things I need to do to my dress before I wear it, but instead I am fiddling about in the garden doing things wrong.

Like, pulling up all my garlic in the rain. When I got home from doing this I read that you should pull your garlic up on a dry day after a dry week… we had that dry week (a glorious, glorious week) but I managed to do this on Friday after a night of rain. So then my garlic (all forty decent-sized bulbs!) was subjected to a complicated, made up as I went along process of drying out. First I laid out a lot of newspaper on the garage floor and arranged the garlics so they didn’t touch each other. Then I pulled out a clotheshorse the next day and laid them over the top of that (the leaves were allowed to overlap).

Then when the sun came out today I got Rata to help me cut the roots off each bulb (she turned out to be VERY good at giving the garlic a haircut) and we pulled the clotheshorse out into the sunshine. At about 5pm I started to braid the garlic. It turns out I am not very good at this.

That is not the kind of garlic braid I remember from my childhood.

Then I made an effort to rescue the tomato plants in my new garden from their wild neighbours – this involved pulling out a lot of coriander and wild rocket I would have liked to let set seeds and digging up a few potatoes I am very much looking forward to eating.

There are some red skinned potato ‘volunteers’ as my landlord calls them (self-seeded, and in the ground for goodness knows how long) and two other varieties, one of which is probably Agria. I’m trying to sprout seven of the smaller of my ‘Tutae Kuri” purple potatoes on the windowsill in the hope that I can squeeze out another crop of them before winter. I am finding this potato growing business really quite exciting.

This is what Tutae Kuri potatoes look like as a Christmas potato salad. I had left staking my tomatoes so late that each plant had four or so stems in need of a prop – so things look very interesting with so many stakes and comparatively few plants. Oh well.

I planted a row of crinkly kale seedlings today, sowed some Mexican coriander and land cress, eyed up a courgette on the plant and watched the blackbirds dive bomb the cat like they thought they were magpies. Quite an exciting day, I must say.