22nd April 2018
I bought a few packets of seeds on-line which arrived a couple of days ago, so I made the most of the good weather today to get some into the ground. Today I've planted wild rocket, carrots (F1 Match) and Land cress, 1 row of each. I've not grown Land cress before, but I understand it's a cross between rocket and watercress. I'm hoping that by putting the carrots between these two, the carrot fly may be put off by the smell.
As a deterrent to the local cats, and sparrows, I put a few sticks over the planting area as protection. These were last year's forsythia prunings. I used a few of them to support netting last year and one of them rooted itself. When we replaced the wooden beds, I dug it up and put it in a pot. Today, I've chopped the top off and put that in the same pot. Hopefully I'll get 2 new plants for free!
11th April 2018
Now the new raised beds are in, I can plant out the garlic. I bought these back in the Autumn along with some onion sets, but didn't want to put them in the ground before repairing the wood. Instead, I put them in pots and left them in my little growhouse over the Winter.
They've grown pretty well despite being almost completely ignored. Some of them have grown well out of the bottom of the pots, so they probably could have gone in the ground a bit sooner. However, we've had a very late Spring this year, with snow over Easter, and this if the first opportunity I've had to get them out.
So, I carefully eased them out of their pots leaving as much root intact as possible and transplanted them into the small square bed. 3 of them had rotted/been eaten by slugs, but I still had 24 good plants to put out.
Update 23rd April
They looked a bit sad when I first put them out, but nearly 2 weeks on they're looking good, undoubtedly helped by the lovely sunny, warm weather we've had for the last week.