Saturday, 26 January 2019

Seeds bought for this year's garden

A lot of my seeds for the garden have in the past come from a subscription I had for Kitchen Garden magazine. Every month it arrived with new vegetable or fruit seeds attached to the cover. But it's been a while since I subscribed to the magazine and when I came to plan the garden this year I discovered that I had run out of a lot of seeds and others had gone out of date. So off we went to our local garden centre of a seed-buying trip. I came back with quite the haul:
The themes in this year's garden are going to be colourful plants and companion planting. That's why I chose non-standard colours of vegetables and also why I bought the calendula, the chrysanthemums and the lavender to plant as a companion alongside the vegetables. The mixed annuals I bought simply because the seeds were cheap and they'll help brighten up the garden.
This year's initial plan for the garden looks like this:

They're in pencil because I'll probably want to change them later. For instance, having just bought a pack of 50 onion sets, more of the root vegetable and allium section is probably now going to be dedicated to onions than I originally planned, and less to carrots and leeks. Also, I suspect I ought to move the tomatoes to use up some of the quarter of the garden dedicated to brassicas at the moment. I don't have a particularly good history with brassicas. We are very prone to both butterflies and slugs here. It's not the ideal position for tomatoes either, because it's the shady side of the garden, but when you do crop rotation in a garden, everything needs to take its turn on the shady side eventually.
The garden right now is looking messier, but more interesting than it previously has at this time of year.

I've left a lot of the root vegetables and brassicas in situ and am still harvesting them as I need them (although it's a bit nasty going out in the garden at this time of year, especially in the evenings, so I'm not using up as many of them as I should). We still have chard, carrots and beetroot waiting to be harvested. There are a few cabbages left. They didn't get very big, but they haven't suffered too badly from slug and caterpillar damage. The tall plant at the back is purple-sprouting broccoli. It hasn't produced any purple sprouts yet, but I live in hope that it still might, as I love that stuff and it's relatively expensive to buy from the shops.

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