Sourdough and Garlic on a Saturday Morning.

Its Saturday morning and as I lay awake early in the frosty dark I was thinking about what I was going to get up today. For a lot of us, the weekend is when we are mostly likely to get the chance to get into the garden for a couple of hours so keen to get out there myself.

First thing will be to get a sourdough loaf started as it likes a good long rising period for all the good fermentation to take place so before too much gets done I’ll start that off. Some of you have kindly given me some good suggestions on how to get the best out of my culture so enjoying the opportunity  to try out some different techniques.

I feel like I’ve stumbled across a whole sub-culture with this sourdough thing. My brother has been visiting this week and he is an old sourdough hack. So we got a couple of loaves done while he was here but I am most likely to be a weekend bread maker.  I personally eat a lot less bread these days as I have listened to my body over the years and can’t really tolerate so much of it. Plus it contributed quite a bit to my expanded waistline and giving up eating so much commercial bread has been a big help in that department. But proper bread is the staff (and stuff) of life so I am never not going to eat it. I’m just going to make sure when I do that it is a good loaf and I am jolly well going to enjoy it. Probably with butter.

So get the loaf started on its morning ferment, and then whip around and do some housework. Who got trained up to do a Saturday morning housework routine?  I know kids sports commitments have played havoc with that tradition but much as I would like to get outside first thing, I can’t get around whipping the sheets off the beds, getting a load of washing on, doing a tidy up, lifting the chairs onto the table and doing a good vacuum, opening up the windows and airing out the house, chucking out the dead flowers and replacing them with fresh ones….

That can take a lot longer sometimes of course but if you don’t do it on Saturday morning then choose another time that suits. Its a good way to recalibrate each week and keep your maintenance up. Talking about maintenance, even a couple of hours a week in the garden is enough to have a good productive vegetable garden. Today I am planning on doing a bit of weekly weed hoeing but the big thing this month is getting a bed ready for garlic.

I normally plant mine around the traditional time of the shortest day (June 21st) but a lot of people have already got theirs in or planting now. Especially if you are in an area susceptible to rust. I grow plenty each year to use and share so always have some nice fat bulbs to use as seed. Choose your biggest healthiest cloves, split them up and pop into a basket ready for planting.

You don’t need a lot of room for garlic but it does have a long growing season of around 6 months. It also kicks off the beginning of the crop rotation cycle - so it is the first thing that gets planted in the next bed in the cycle.  Looking on the Crop Rotation Poster, I am going from year 4 to year 1 which means that root crops are going in where the heat loving fruiting crops have finished. Add plenty of compost, manure, and fertiliser if you use it and leave for a week or two before planting.

So that’s what I hope to get done today.  I always want to do more but have learned that its better to do something than try to do it all and achieve nothing. So that’s my day sorted. I’ll do another story about garlic soon as its one of my anchor crops in the garden and a good crop for most of us to grow, even if you have limited space and not a lot of time.

Hope you have a good productive Saturday and happy gardening.