Garden Bears' World - Garlic and Garbage!

 Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Garden Bears' World with me, Endon Bear.

As you can see, Polar and Grizzly have taken down the huge runner bean plants we grew from our friend Chomper's magic beans, but Polar has saved some seed pods so we will have some to grow and share next year.

We will probably start them off in loo-roll middles, like these.  These aren't for runner beans, though - they are for sweet peas!  We are a little bit late with an autumn sowing, but have saved half of the pack so we can start again in the spring if these fail, or for some later flowers if these do well.

I have put two little seeds in each tube, then covered them over with compost and firmed it down, so the little seeds are tucked in very cosy.

Finally, I put some plastic covers over the top, to keep them warm and to stop any little mice - who sometimes come into the greenhouses in the winter - from digging them out and nibbling them!

Polar and I were going to plant some garlic in the garden, until we saw what was happening to our leeks.  They have been attacked by a pest called allium leaf miner, which is a little fly that lays its eggs in leek plants.  Polar says we will have to dig them up and burn them!

'And we had better grow our garlic on the allotment,' she said.  'There are no allium family plants growing there now, so hopefully no leaf miners over-wintering nearby.'

'If we start it in modules, we can make sure it's rooted before we plant it out,' I suggested.  'Although we mustn't keep it in the greenhouse all winter, because it needs some cold weather to grow properly.'

We have four different varieties to grow this year, to see which is best.  Most of the cloves were from Solent White, which is a soft-neck variety with medium-sized cloves.  The others are all hard-neck types, which have fewer, bigger cloves per bulb.

As you can see, if it all grows we will have lots of garlic, although some of the plants are for Polar's friends to grow in their garden.

When we came in from our garden, I had an idea about the leeks, so went to talk to Hanley Bear.

'Polar says we have to burn them,' I told him.  'But I wondered if we could safely compost them, in the hot bin.'

The hot bin is a new garden gadget Polar bought this year, for making super-fast and super clean compost.  It is a very big polystyrene box which you gradually fill with a mixture of kitchen scraps, cardboard or paper and a few woodchips.  If you keep the mix right and add more regularly, it gets much hotter than a normal compost heap and will kill weed seeds, bugs and fungus.

We bears have put Hanley in charge of it, because he likes science projects.

Hanley went to check the temperature in the bin.  Although it was a cool day, the thermometer in the lid of the bin said the air inside it was at 20 degrees Centigrade.

'We have to check the temperature inside the compost,' Hanley explained.  'If it's up to 40 degrees, we can put anything organic in for composting!'

Polar helped him into the bin, holding his other thermometer, which has a spike on the bottom.  He pushed it into the compost, then climbed out and closed the lid.

A few minutes later, he checked it again.  'It's hot,' he said.  'It was nearly 30 degrees and I could feel the heat through the pads on my back paws!  But it's not hot enough to definitely kill the fly larvae.'

So Polar will have to make a small bonfire after all.  She says we might be able to grow leeks in the garden in future if we start them early, in the greenhouse, and plant them out after April but harvest them before October, so we miss the little flies' breeding cycle.  We hope so, because we like leeks.

And we can still eat any good ones that are left!