Stephanie's Garden Blog

For the first time in a long time my first priority wasn't more watering when I went out to the kitchen garden this morning. Yesterday we had an inch of rain which has left the garden feeling refreshed and the plants have lifted their drooping heads and you can almost hear them growing.

The cordon tree is something like the gardener's victory over the tree. Here, the domesticated tree no longer pushes itself self-determined toward the light, but the gardener dictates where it grows with this step over support.

Setting up a store cupboard full of your own home-produced preserves is such a marvellous way to capture the full flavour of what you have grown that it far surpasses anything you can ever buy in a supermarket.

Well the promised storms by the weather forecasters have finally arrived and we've had a few heavy showers to keep the garden ticking over. It had been been 8 weeks since we had any rain in the Kitchen Garden and the temperatures over the past week has been in the 30's every day so these showers are very welcome.

Harrod Horticultural are looking for a part-time kitchen gardener (minimum 20 hours per week, flexible to support business needs), to work in their private garden in the Somerleyton area.

This week we are going to be planting out broad beans for autumn harvesting. We have never grown them for autumn harvesting before and are very excited to see how they perform. We have a large space where our disastrous onions and garlic grew and that we had originally earmarked for our leeks. Given our white rot problems we couldn?t use it for leeks so decided to give autumn broad beans a try.

Like many gardeners around the country we now seem to find ourselves constantly watering, or worrying about watering, our crops. Rather than despair about the disasters being caused by the scorching weather, we have decided to revel in the positive effects the hot sunshine is having.

In Stephanie's Kitchen Garden, moving our pots into the shade of a north facing fence and standing them in trays to keep water at their feet has proved very effective. We have mulched raised beds with strulch and the plants certainly seem to be happier for it. This week we will be continuing to strulch around the tops of larger pots that cannot be moved, as well as other beds.

It has now been three weeks since we had any rainfall in Stephanies' Kitchen Garden and the forecast shows sunny and hot weather for at least the next three weeks to come. In our part of the world, near the most easterly coast of the UK, we are used to gardening in the driest part of the country, but usually enjoy the odd thunderstorm to keep the garden from drying out completely in the heatwave.