Three days of steady labour, aching bones and sore muscles: but check out that second photo! Visible weeds mostly gone, maverick potatoes, onions and garlic that we overlooked in the fall are also gone, soil is turned over and new onions, potatoes and garlic planted. We’re fairly manic about getting rid of the old potatoes, although the young, divided garlic can give us a bit of spring garlic.

The risk of disease and bugs is too great to leave last season’s vegetables. Potatoes, in particular, easily develop potato bugs if old plants are allowed to stay.

Lettuce cover gives us fresh salads two weeks earlier

In the ground now: 1kg each of Desirée, Ratte and Agata potatoes, 70 red onions and about the same number of white, about 30 lettuce plants of four varieties. Strawberries have been divided, replanted and fresh straw put around them to keep in the moisture and keep out slugs. That’s optimism, since without rain we won’t have slugs.

Patate.ch is a nice Swiss web site, in French, for learning more about potatoes, with planting and harvest times.

Our lettuce cover is a great addition, as it allows us to put the young plants out about two weeks earlier. It provides just enough wind protection and shade to help them along.

Grow, grow, grow! The harvest starts in early July.

The garden before, a challenging sight, and after, with 2 people labouring for 3 days

Serious gardening work lies ahead

Swiss Alpine garden planted! Foreground, dry manure waiting for pumpkin seeds, middle, onions and garlic, behind them the potato mounds, and newly replanted strawberries with fresh straw

We’ve had a metre or so of fresh snow, falling slow and steady. It makes the perfect blanket for my onions and garlic, happily snug on the slope, above the swing, which won’t get much use for several weeks, I think.

It’s also very good for the raspberry canes at the top of the slope, near the fence. They’re about a metre high and sudden wet snows and winds can break them. Under snow, they are well protected.

The end of a season, then the end of a year and the end of all the fine things we’ve grown during the year: for me the holidays represent the last hurrah of my garden, but it’s no cause for sadness. Quite the opposite, with unexpected treats coming indoors just as I’m feeling too housebound, and I’m reminded why I enjoy having Spring in my sightings.

Photos: 24 December, the celery is alive and well! The next day: time to harvest, out from under a foot of snow in the Alps.

Each end of year in the Alps brings its own version of the annual winter holiday surprise. At the end of 2006 I had magnificent bouquets of dried grasses and herbs to place in every room. This October, after too little sunshine and too much rain they looked like an Equatorial tribe stranded at the North Pole, weak and unhappy, so I left most of them outdoors to brown and dry with the weather.

The Christmas gift from my garden this December was unexpected food and trimmings for holiday meals.

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