February in the garden

 February in our tiny back garden. The soil was still very cold so waiting was in order. My chicken manure order didn't arrive, so once again, I'm growing on nutrient free soil for the moment. Since our slightly failed attempt to do the Garden Bird Watch, Cubling is taken by birds and we made some bird food. The birds do their best to ignore it.

The washing line is still in weather's hand, but I can feel the spring sun and soon the washing will be outside again, giving the house a chance to dehumidify. I hope.

The shed got painted in winter. I love it. It makes such a difference to have a splash of colour and I'm sure we'll also paint the raised beds before long.

I tried to plant onion and garlic sets before the winter and it's rather amazing that they've sprouted, especially considering the cold and long winter we had. And the nutrient free soil I gave them.

Just this week, the plum tree that I was given for my birthday got planted in the front garden. There isn't enough soil in the back (the sunny side) to plant it - the back is really container gardening. The front doesn't have much sun but I picked the sunniest position there is and cross my fingers. When digging the hole for the tree I hit on soil which looked like this:

I'm pretty sure you could use it for some pottery. I remember that my parent's allotment had clay soil, how they cursed the digging of it because it was so hard and eventually led to giving it up altogether, but never have I seen something that looked and felt just like pottery clay. I hope that I prepared it sufficiently for the tree to be happy. So far, it's doing well in its new position. Two soft fruit stalks got planted in containers too, and my rocket, coriander and basil is doing well in the conservatory (aka play room), where the potatoes are being chitted too. I've rearranged the toys to clear surfaces for some seed propagation, and make the playroom look a bit tidier in the process too.

No chickens yet, and there's still a lot to be done that I'd meant to tackle in the winter and didn't get around to due to the harsh temperature and sick kids. It's all a work in progress though and that's the beauty of it.

all set: growing in winter

The cold season has most definitely arrived. Two nights of frost and markedly colder days have surprised me. Autumn is my favourite season, in a melancholic kind of way. What I love about autumn are the colours, the transformation and preparation for winter. There's so much to explore outdoors, and indoors the preparation for winter, getting the warm clothes out, making jam, the business of the various festivals ahead of us (doubled for our bicultural family). I look forward to doing things indoors, making the home cosy.

And yet, every year, I get surprised by the sudden arrival of the cold season. I feel so very cold, reluctant to go out, and wonder how I'm going to make it through the winter. Oh and that clock changing thing - it makes me really irritable. Then, things fall back into some sort of swing and the cold stops feeling so cold.

This year, I have a lot of plans for my garden, yet can't do much physical work. So what better than to plant some easy growing winter crops, namely garlic and onions? Garlic is so healthy for you, and easy to grow - just separate the cloves from any bulb that you buy and plant them in good soil where you weren't growing garlic recently. Thanks to Homemademummy, I now also have a batch of winter growing onion sets. One raised bed is already cleared and the other one will be this week after the frost destroyed the still growing pumpkins, and if I have spare onions, they'll go to my neighbour who also grows her own.

This is the beauty of growing your own, the generosity and spirit of sharing. A pumpkin to carve from my SIL's garden, tatties, carrots and tomatoes from my FIL's garden, onion sets from a blogger, a total stranger. Sharing seeds, sets, plants and crops really is something very special, it brings people together and it feels so good to give and receive, it's always a very special gift because effort and love has gone into it, and yet it also comes free, it's a gift from nature, which is therefore only to be passed on as a gift. A bit like knitting, where the value is the love and manual labour, which you simply cannot put a value against - you can't ever make profit out of knitting, and therefore knitted items can really only be gifted.

This is the season of preparing the garden for winter, clearing all the old growth and it's a gift in itself that there will be some winter crops, overwintering just like us.

::This post is part of Urban Food Growing Tuesday. If you grow your own in urban spaces, no matter how small, and you blog about it, please share your post in the linky list below, which is open for one week::