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Growing garlic

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 Garlic is one of the easier crops to grow.  To get the best chance of getting a good crop it needs to be planted in autumn, October or November, so that it gets a period of coldness.  It can be planted until February but a good crop is less likely. Site and soil: well worked and fertile soil, sunny open position How to plant: break the bulb into separate cloves and plant them 'as deep as you like and as early as you like' as I was advised many years ago when I first grew garlic.  Some people plant it with the top near the soil surface, as you do for onion sets, but I always planted mine deeper 2 -5 cm below the surface. Cultivation: weed when necessary. Garlic is prone to rust (a fungal infection of the leaves) but ignore it as it does not harm the bulbs. If a flower starts to develop, pinch it out. Harvest: when the tops dry and shrivel in summer, lift the garlic and let it dry in the sun before storing it in a dry place. These photos show elephant garlic, ...
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Aeoniums

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 Aeoniums are fascinating succulent plants.  A few years ago I was given one, and since then it's gone through a number of different forms.  The most recent was quite unpredictable. Six months ago I had two plants they weren't doing much.  I transplanted them in fresh compost in bigger pots, as a friend suggested.  In retrospect I should have used a much grittier growing medium, but nevertheless one plant thrived, shown below, and the other didn't.     I cut the stem of the less vigorous one in half and planted the top half.  The top isn't growing, but the stem of the bottom half has produced lots of little rosettes.   What will happen next?  Will all the rosettes grow out of the stem?  I'll keep you posted.
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Geum 'Bell Bank'

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 Geum 'Bell Bank' is an early flowering variety which is quite close in habit to it's wild predecessor Geum rivale , aka Water avens.  The flowers are a delightful pink colour rising above a mound of bright green foliage which remains in a dome after the flowers fade, two months or more after they first open in early April. I've had the plant for a few years and would like to split it.  I chickened out this spring, but autumn is another opportunity to do it.
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Splitting Calathea 'triostar' - an Easter Monday project.

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 I bought the original plant from an EHS plant sale - I can't remember how long ago - and it cost me £4.  What great value it's been.  I think it only had 4 leaves, and now, at least four years later, there are four 'shoots' in the pot each with five or six leaves.   Calathea triostar before it was split. It was in its original 1.5 litre pot, so I decided to use the same size pot for the separated plants.  I chose Melcourt Sylvagrow peat-free multi-purpose compost to plant them in, my current favourite.  The plant came cleanly out of its pot.  Each shoot comes from a rhizome, so to separate the shoots the rhizome has to be broken.  I did this by gently breaking them apart (you could cut them). The four transplanted shoots were watered and are now recovering in the (empty) bath, where it is well lit but not directly.  It's an ideal place for them but not very practical in the long run.  Calathea does best in warm humid conditions....
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Bare root fruit bushes

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I'm planning to give up the allotment I've had for 20 years.  The produce I'll miss the most is the fruit: blackcurrants, redcurrants, gooseberries and, most important, raspberries.  So I've bought new bare root bushes/canes from Blackmoor Nurseries, our nearest and very good suppliers, to establish in the bottom of my long thin garden.  It's fairly shady, but growing fruit bushes there shouldn't be a problem.  It's very different from the allotment where it's sunny and quite exposed so it's a bit of an experiment. The photos show the bare root bushes heeled in my future veg patch.  The chard behind them is being ravaged by little snails.  They'll have to go in the compost bin according to the latest pronouncement from the RHS to love our snails and slugs.     I have to move some plants in order to plant the bushes where I want them.  Fingers crossed the weather will dry up and make this possible to do soon.  They should be planted ...
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Daphnes

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 It's a pity that scent can't be captured online because it's a stunning feature of most Daphnes.  The first one I encountered was at what is now the Sir Harold Hillier Garden near Romsey on an EHS trip!  Our guide told  that the scent of Daphne bholua  'Jacqueline Postill' would blow our socks off and so it did.  Here's my mine,  in full flower after first coming into flower in December. A lower growing, bushy variety in my front garden, is Daphne odora aureomarginata.    It has spread a lot, and though the books say they shouldn't be pruned, it'll have to be as it's overgrowing other plants.  When it was new and small it was tramped on by builders who stuck together with blue plastic tape, so hopefully it'll survive another chop. Not all Daphnes have a strong scent.  Daphne laureola forms a low growing rounded bush with green lightly scented flowers.  It is a woodland plant, growing wild in Southern England and flowering thr...
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Abelia grandiflora keeps the bees going

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  Abelia grandiflora grows into a large evergreen shrub with attractive arching branches bearing small shiny dark green leaves, and from summer till early winter it's covered with flowers. It's a bit big for my narrow garden, and I had it severely trimmed in July.  It looked dead for a while but recovered.  The sprays of small pink flowers and bracts started to appear in late summer and are still going strong in mid November.  It's a useful feeding station for bees when most other flowers have finished.
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