Preparing our winter garden

To prepare for our winter planting Royce & I have extended our horse shoe garden which was really were it all began, When we first moved here 8 years go we inherited a parsley bed over, time we cleared the parsley out and I planted my first crop of tomatoes just up from where you can we our bean structure in the top right photo. it then just kept being extended to be our herb plot, then we decided to make it our perennial garden.  But as our main plot needs resting this winter we decided to grow our winter crop over here.  The small bed near the pool fence is where our garlic will grow this year.

 

This is what our main plot looks like at the moment, a bit of a mess as we ready it for the girls to come down and work the soil for us.

 
Our celery is the only thing still growing in the main plot and we willcover it when the girls visit to protect it from them

 

Above is our nursery where we start our sewing polystyrene boxes, then once they are seedlings we transplant them into larger boxes that have been lined with milk bottles.  Once these are more established they get moved to garden beds.  the milk bottle stay on for cloches until the plant has established it self into the garden.



 Our herb bed is doing very well.  we have in the last few weeks finally put a border around it and this has help incredibly with keeping the lawn out of the garden. Here you can see some of the milk bottle still be used as cloches for lettuce.

 This bed is our winter beetroot, sugar beet, leeks, spring onions and Asian greens.  Royce had great success last time he sprouted them under planks of wood so we are giving it another shot.

To tidy up the garden we had to harvest quite a lot, here is the last of our kohl rabi, cerliac, spring onions and 3 bunches of celery.

 

We chopped half of that up added a few veg from the fridge and made a HUGE pot of vegie stock, which has since been turned into many meals for freezer.

 

we also harvested quite a lot of rhubarb a few weeks ago that I turned into the yummiest compote to have with my yoghurt for breakfast. I chopped it up, added the zest and juice of one orange and baked it for 30 minutes then added a punnet of quartered strawberries and cooked for a further ten minutes.

 

so that's what is happening in our garden and kitchen, what is happening in yours?