A fresh start

Well here it is. I've decided to start blogging about my gardening in the hope that I can maybe inspire other people to pick up some tools and get to work on the earth and what a day to start it all on. It's been a perfect autumnal day with sunshine and beautiful colours. I started tidying up my poly tunnel yesterday and today I've been sowing some veg for next year.

One of my raised beds in the poly. The fibrous stuff is straw from my poultry's bedding. It's been in the compost for about six months and is rotting down nicely. 

This is the variety of broad bean that I've sown today. I'll post progress on these later on. You may have noticed that I've sown them a little earlier than Nov. Only just though!

One of the two varieties of garlic I've sown. There were three bulbs in the pack but one was in poor condition, which only gave me two healthy cloves as the other cloves in that bulb were under attack by a pest.

A pricey variety with only one bulb in the pack. All the cloves were fine. I'm hoping this will give me a good yield and great flavour.

Alpine strawberries I grew from seed earlier this year. Some (little) fruit was produced but they were a late sowing. They are from the James Wong collection and are white coloured strawberries. Can you spot the wolf spider among the leaves?

This was one of the unhealthy cloves in the Thermodrome pack. Looks like a pest ate its way through. 

During my clean up operation I picked these little snails out of the poly. I could see them laying eyes on potential tasty treats so I moved them on quickly! I don't put down pellets often because I tend to have frogs living in the poly over summer. When I know they are hibernating/overwintering then I may use pellets if necessary.

One garlic bulb can give you quite a few cloves. The varieties I've sown have given me ten cloves per bulb on average. You can see the unhealthy bulb in the background there on the right. 

Not the best picture but I wanted to show you how I planted my garlic cloves. They are spaced apart as per instructions from the supplier at 4 inches. They are buried an inch deep and I used a small plank to line them up as neatly as possible.

  The work I did today was quick and easy. Best of all it made me feel quite relaxed but it's not all easy work. I don't want to put people off, but gardening isn't always relaxing and rewarding. It can equally be annoying and disheartening at times. I've had my fair share of both good and bad experiences but I want to show people what real gardening is all about. Don't get me wrong, I love watching gardening programmes on the TV but they do make it all look so easy and with great results almost every day. I wish it were like that! Apart from the poly tunnel, I also have two allotment plots and I'll be blogging about those too. From time to time I'll share some tips with you and I'll share good news/bad news.

Thanks for reading.