Winter Solstice - the beginning of the harvest year

Last year was my first time growing food (or indeed anything from seed). I started small, trying courgettes, capsicum, two types of tomatoes, and plenty of basil. It's now time to plan the new season's planting so I thought I'd track this year's harvest progress online. I kept an offline gardening diary last year, but blogging has the advantage of being able to add photos and categories to blog posts, so at the end of the season I can search out a complete set of illustrated posts related to a particular crop.

My harvest year begins at the winter solstice. Not much else is going on mid-winter, but this is when garlic traditionally goes in the ground to begin its six-month growing stint until harvest time at the summer solstice (ie late December). We use a reasonable amount of garlic (and it goes well with the bounty of tomatoes we will hopefully get this year!) so this year we're growing our own. All you do is grab a single fat garlic clove and pop it in the ground, 5cm down and pointy end up.

I've planted garlic in two spots. Six cloves of organic garlic (imported from California) went in by our letterbox on 14 June - this spot has good soil, hasn't had anything growing in it before except weeds, and does get sun although not so much in winter. These took no more than a couple of weeks to sprout - I wasn't expecting this to happen so quickly so I hadn't been checking them, but they were a reasonable size by the time I noticed them.

I also purchased some Printador garlic cloves from Kings Plant Barn and planted 15 or so of these out by our barbecue on 28 June (a couple of leftover cloves ended up in the letterbox row). This area has clay soil and again gets a reasonable amount of sun but not in winter. These took three weeks to just start peeping through the ground.

Unfortunately there's been a lot of heavy rain since they went in, so hopefully they aren't busy rotting away underground. Here's the letterbox row today (and yes, I really should clean up the dropped camellia flowers):



We also impulse-purchased some strawberry plants at Kings Plant Barn, half a dozen Pajaro and half a dozen Camarosa, and Kere has kindly constructed some planters for them. The plants were starting to look a bit sad by the time I actually got them into the planters on Saturday (in between the showers) - and the next 24 hours brought heavy rail and hail onto them! So we're keeping our fingers crossed they survive.

The only other things growing in the garden are the citrus trees (two lemons, one orange, one lemonade, all relatively neglected), and a sole surviving purple broccoli seedling. This has managed to survive the two months of storms since it was planted by the letterbox but no sign of anything other than leaves yet.