Pig Sty Avenue

I had a couple of hours in the garden in the early evening, (it's already getting too hot to do very much during the day, my patch of ground facing south west as it does). I raked over the garlic bed I'd cleared a few days ago. There's an ants' nest at one end of it: big buggers unlike anything we get in the UK. Anyway, I hope they'll leave the garlic alone. I planted just one row down the middle of the bed, the cloves about 10" apart, and planted so that only the sprouting green shoot was above ground. Then I planted "Russian Giant" sunflower seeds, that I'd bought back home, in two small beds, each about 2x4 ft. One of them I planted as per the instructions: each sowing a pair of seeds, and they were about 18" apart. This bed is under the kitchen window, and I'm looking ahead to a time when birds might be attracted to the seeds, and the flowers should be at a level with the window. The other bed I was deliberately more slapdash...

Yesterday I got into the garden, lifting turf to prepare a bed about 4x15 ft. I raked it and sowed it straightaway with fenugreek I’d had soaking in a bucket for a couple of days – too long because a few of the seeds were sprouting. That’s really a kind of holding crop to put nitrogen and organic matter into the ground. I’ll probably be using a lot of it here because it’s so cheap, plentiful, suited to the climate and useful. Then I dug another bed tonight about 1 1/2x15 ft. That’s for garlic, probably. I say probably because the garlic in the shops was actually pretty useless for eating, but a couple of days in the fridge and it was sprouting so would have made excellent seed. I’ve got about two dozen cloves in the fridge ready to plant, and went out tonight to get more, only to find the skinny perfect-for-planting garlic was off the greengrocers shelves and replace by string bags of fat imported stuff. Undeterred, I’ve broken up a couple of bulbs and put them in the...

I've sown hundreds of fenugreek seeds in the greenhouse (which is going to have heating over the winter). I got the seeds from the Chinese supermarket in Town, and soaked them for three days in a small bucket of water: they are hard and unseedlike in the packet, but resemble wheat seeds after you soak them. I scattered the seeds on, and raked them over roughly, so that some are on the surface, others will be a little below. After 48 hours, most of the ones on the surface are sprouting, so I'm anticipating a good germination ratio. (I knew they would sprout. In Libya, I put some in a tin on soaked tissue paper: they indeed sprouted well and I'd trim them to put in salads as one would with cress. After a week or so of this hotel-room farming, though, I looked into the tin and was disgusted to see hundreds of little beetles squirming around the seedlings' roots, like that insect motif in Blue Velvet .) The bed in the greenhouse is garden soil which hasn't been c...