Sprinkle Epsom salts on to your soil to enhance the health and flavour of your winter crops
I may never learn to love the dark days of winter, but the wonderful thing about horticulture is that there is always a silver lining, particularly if you are a veg grower. Even as many plants around us slide into dormancy, there is a range of winter veg that can be planted now and which will look after itself for months at a time. Not only are these arguably the easiest of all seasonal crops to grow, but with a simple five-minute trick of mine you could also make them measurably tastier and more nutritious than most of what you can buy in the shops.
Autumn-planting onion and shallot sets are in stores everywhere right now and, once planted according to packet instructions in a well-tended bed, should require almost zero intervention from you until harvest. The same deal applies to garlic and a little known fourth member of the family, the echalote grise, also called (rather confusingly) the French grey shallot. Although neither French nor a shallot, this is in my opinion the finest flavoured of all the onion family. Spring onions can, likewise, be sown now from seed for harvesting from late winter to early spring.