Video
Neville gets round to doing some weeding on the Wonderpost allotment
The Elephant Garlic starts growing
Neville’s quest for the perfect Garlic bulb continues
I’ve gone garlic mad!
Avid viewers of our Wonderpost allotment videos will recall that I recently planted some garlic cloves. They were a variety called Cristo and produced by Taylor’s Bulbs. After planting I thought, “well that’s enough garlic to see us alright for next year” but this weekend I couldn’t resist making a spontaneous purchase of more garlic bulbs.
On Saturday I visited the RHS Urban Garden Show in Vincent Square, London and the first stall I stumbled across was The Garlic Farm, a business located on the Isle of Wight, selling – yes, you’ve guessed it – garlic products including garlic bulbs for planting. I chose two varieties, Early Purple White and Elephant Garlic. Early Purple White originates in South West France and should crop in May. Apparently it has a zingy flavour and is best eaten shortly after harvesting. Elephant Garlic on the other hand is best described as a fat bottomed leek with garlic tendencies. The guy from The Garlic Farm assured me that each clove would produce pretty big bulbs. You can see the size of the cloves in this picture. The Elephant Garlic are the one’s on the right and the Early Purple White, on the left of the picture.
This weekend I’m going to break up the bulbs of the Early Purple variety and plant the cloves on the Wonderpost allotment. I’m then going to plant the 2 cloves of Elephant Garlic in some containers with a mix of garden soil and Wonderpost.
Wonderpost Farm Fresh Compost is available in the Wonderpost store with FREE shipping on 20 bag pallets until Christmas
An allotment tale of two halves
Neville explains what we’re doing with our allotment, splitting the ground into two halves, one with Wonderpost and one without, and some interesting facts about Wonderpost Soil Improver.
After testing the allotment soil PH Roger filled up the bucket on the telehandler with a shed load of Wonderpost soil improver and dumped it in a big pile in the middle of the allotment. With one of those large landscaper rakes, I set about spreading it across half of the plot, trying to achieve a coverage of between 5 – 10kg per square metre. I’m not sure how accurate my spreading technique was but I thought “gardening is all about experimenting so what’s the worst that can happen if I have spread it too thick”!
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Testing the soil PH before digging in Wonderpost Soil Improver
If you read my first post you’ll know that I’m planning to check out the pH of the soil on our freshly dug piece of land in Hasketon. On Monday I bought a very simple soil testing kit from my local garden centre for the princely sum of £3.99!
This kit contains two small test tubes, each one containing some form of powder which when mixed with a small amount of soil and water will show the pH of the soil. I set to work, followed the instructions and after several minutes the water in the test tube had changed colour.
I compared the colour to the colour chart on the back of the packet and lo and behold our soil is a neutral pH. This is great news as ideally for growing veg we need a pH that’s slightly acidic to neutral. In other words a pH of between 6.5 to 7.
Over time as we begin to apply fertiliser to our plot I am expecting the soil to become slightly more acidic – that’s what tends to happen after repeatedly adding a fertiliser to the soil.
Having checked the soil for pH I am now ready to spread half of the plot with Wonderpost soil improver.