A good start [Part 2]...

William and his carrots!

This was shot in late August this year.  Early in the year I'd found a large pot (you can see it behind William) hidden in the shed, and thought it would be fun to see what we could do with it. I can't actually remember where we got the carrot seeds from but William helped me plant them and we watched them grow.

I honestly had no idea that they would be so successful, and our little gardener was very impressed when he pulled them up for me!

We were even more impressed when he ate them with dinner that evening!  :-)

New Shoots...

Garlic in the snow, a photo by Craig Richardson on Flickr.

This shows how little I know... I knew garlic needed to go in before winter, as bulbs that go through the cold spell are bigger than those planted in spring. But for some reason I thought they'd be like flower bulbs, and lie dormant until spring - so I got a bit of a shock when I went to check how my raised bed had coped with the light dusting of snow last night and found this...

[About the photo: a quick shot with the macro lens whilst William was exploring the snow.  I'm not entirely happy with the depth of field - may need to reshoot on a tripod so I can get a narrower aperture...]

A good start...

Success!, a photo by Craig Richardson on Flickr.

We're not going to be starting completely from scratch in 2013 - we've had a few successes this year - and one of them has been the cherry tomatoes. We did pretty much nothing to sort out the greenhouse - just bunged a few seeds in pots and waited to see what happened.

The end result was more tomatoes than we could eat - next year I need to think in advance about what I'm going to do with them - any recipe suggestions?

[About the photo: shot with my trusty Sigma 105mm F2.8 Macro. One of the lenses I've bought - lacks the hypersonic focusing and image stabilisation of the Nikkor equivalent, but its pin sharp and was half the price... The lovely dynamic green background is a pot of chives shot with a wide aperture to throw it nicely out of focus.]

Gardener's Friend

Gardener's Friend, a photo by Craig Richardson on Flickr.

This little coal tit kept me company as I mowed the lawn this morning. Of course, the fresh bird seed on the feeder might have had something to do with it, but even then I managed to get within a couple of feet of him to get this shot...

Developments...

The new raised bed

Exciting news - the vegetable patch is getting there!  With a great deal of help from my dad, I've got the raised bed built, and since this picture was taken I've topped up the compost level, constructed some netting over the top (don't want it being used as a cat litter tray!) and got some garlic bulbs planted so they can over-winter!  

Longer term we're hoping to get this bit of the garden landscaped, but in the mean time I'm hoping to get some vegetables out of it. Now I just need to decide what I'm going to plant in the spring!  Any suggestions?