With fingers burning from icy damp and numb toes I
grapple with the monthly chores in the Kitchen Garden. All sense of
decorum is lost in the scrabble to stay warm, gaudy ski-trousers
and layer upon layer of decidedly unstylish attire, flinging muck
to and fro over the beds in yet another sleety
downpour.
I am in stark contrast to the
garden, it’s elegant lines emphasised by the hoary silver
frost. How dignified and dainty the plaited bay trees look in their
umber ‘Long
Toms’ with a dusting of powdery snow atop them.
The stark winter landscape makes the most of features like
these.
I peer into frosted ’Bell
Cloches’ catching a glimpse of misted Mizuna,
how can something so delicate be so hardy?
Lamb's lettuce is one of the toughest leaves
in the garden though, it has survived the regular harsh frosts we
have experienced this winter, shiny new leaves pushing up again and
again after the crown gets completely desiccated by the freezer
draw conditions, in fact it is so persistent that I will simply
have to mulch around it! I cannot bear to pull up the lovely
emerald green rosettes just yet.
The winter greens in our
‘Earthbox’ have been
imbued with restored vigour now that the days are lengthening. The
Chinese cabbage has been cut and is ‘coming again’ as
is the spinach and the rest of the oriental leaves, all crops are
much valued at this time of year and I glad that I made those
autumn sowings all those months ago.
I love a bit of muck! Organic gardening is
all about putting something in to get the best out. My attempts to
enrich the ground here at the garden have been thwarted by all this
cold. You simply cannot spread bags of frozen manure, so I was
forced to just wait for what seemed like an age before Jack Frost
loosened his grip on this corner of East Anglia. Hence the working
in decidedly unfortunate conditions described above.
Warming up the beds is the next job after
spreading all that glorious muck around. The winter armoury
includes
fleeces, plastic and cloches and they
are all deployed around the garden to raise the soil temperatures
ready for early crops.
In the greenhouse
the Grow
Light kit shines out and banishes that
horribly repressive winter grey.
Little tomato seedlings basking in its unseasonal glow, alongside
are the aubergines and peppers neatly sowed in compact root
trainers. These fit a lot of seedlings into a small space without
the horrible teasing out that can result in a too densely sown seed
tray.
I have plumped for two varieties of aubergine
‘Black Beauty’ this one was a real favourite of
Stephanie’s last season, and the striking white ‘Rosa
D’Bianca’. I have scaled down my rather eclectic and
varied mix of tomatoes this year, going for some more heavy
croppers including that good old ‘Money Maker’. My
grandad was a grower and he swore by these plants, bearers of a
heavy crop of uniformly...”nice marrrtooes”.
Peppers are something my grandad did not
grow, but I hope to make him proud (up there in his pottering shed
in the clouds) with a nice crop of ‘Marconi’ and
‘Sweet D’Asti Giallo’. Hopefully Stephanie will
like them too!
Although the Grow Lights do give
off a gentle heat I have deployed a heat mat under my precious
seedlings to make sure everything is at the optimum temperature. If
you want a lower temperature for some seeds you can raise them up
from the mat a little (I turn an empty seed tray upside down and
pop the sown seed tray on top) check the temperature with a
thermometer to get it just right.
Well there’s cold, very cold and
then there’s the potting shed at midday early February this
year. Brrrr does not really even begin to convey the penetrating
cold that seemed to permeate every inch of the garden including my
bones; saying this however, I am well aware that we were rather
lucky here in Suffolk, and that much of the country was brought to
near standstill, roll on the spring and some march
sunshine.
