Notes

Garlic in the north bed

Hardneck garlic does best when planted in the first half of November, once the soil has cooled but before it freezes hard. I break the bulbs into cloves the day before planting and keep the largest for planting, because a bigger clove makes a bigger bulb. Plant each clove pointed end up, about five centimetres down, and leave a hand's width between them so the bulbs have room to swell.

The mulch matters more than I expected. Last year I used straw and the mice ate half the cloves before spring. This year the shredded oak leaves are thicker and drier, and I have set a few old mousetraps between the rows, baited with peanut butter, well away from anything a child or a dog could reach.

In spring, watch the scapes. Cut them when they begin to curl, which encourages the bulb to put its energy underground. The scapes are good in omelettes and in a pan of potatoes.

Working with clay

The clay here sets like brick when it dries and smears like putty when it is wet, so the working window is narrow: a few days in late spring and a few days in early autumn. I stopped digging altogether after the second year. Instead I spread a layer of compost, around five centimetres, every autumn and let the worms do the mixing. It takes longer, but the structure improves steadily and the bed stops cracking in July.

Two things helped more than anything else. The first was a bag of coarse horticultural sand, mixed into the top few centimetres of the middle bed at the start. The second was a habit of never walking on the beds once they are planted, which keeps the surface open and stops the compaction that undoes the rest.

A simple test is worth doing every few years. Fill a jar a third of the way with soil, add water until it is nearly full, shake it hard and leave it overnight. The sand settles first, then the silt, then the clay, and the layers show how much of each you have. Mine is still mostly clay, but the silt band is thicker than it was.

The old apple tree

The tree is older than the houses behind it and produces a crop that is never quite what the year promised. Pruning it in winter is the only job I do with any confidence. I remove dead wood first, then anything crossing the centre of the canopy, and I try to leave the open shape the tree already has rather than forcing it into a textbook vase.

For codling moth I now use a band of corrugated card round the trunk from late July. The caterpillars crawl down to pupate and end up under the card, where a daily check with a stiff brush catches most of them. It is tedious. It is also free, and it has halved the number of wormy apples I throw away.

Thinning in June made the largest difference to size. I take off the small side fruitlets and leave one apple per cluster where there are several. It feels wasteful for about a week. Then the remaining apples start to grow in earnest.

Saving seed from beans

Choose the healthiest plants in the middle of the season and leave their best pods on the vine until they are dry and papery and rattle when shaken. Pick a dry day. Shell the beans into a bowl, sort out any that are small, split or marked, and spread the rest on a plate to dry for a week in a warm room away from direct sun.

Store the dry seed in a paper envelope inside a jar with a few sachets of silica gel, and write the variety and the year on the envelope in pencil. Seed stored this way has germinated well for three years in my experience. After that the rate drops, so I sow a few extra each spring to be safe.