Stephanie's Garden Blog

It has been an exciting week in the kitchen garden, we have installed the new superior raised metal beds in the fruit cage. These are to be the new home of the autumn raspberries and the blueberries.

The kitchen garden is quiet at the moment, sprouting broccoli and young cabbages are a few of the vegetables growing but in the greenhouse, it is a different matter. A variety of seedlings are beginning to shoot.now. Cucumbers are taking off in the heated propagator, alongside the chillies and peppers.

Last week began clearing up after Storm Ciara. We were lucky here as we had minimal storm damage. Just lots of small branches and twigs down, and plenty of pine cones under foot!

We have had some windy days this week with more challenging weather forecast for us for the weekend which will mean we will have a lot of debris to clean up next week.

We have had some really frosty conditions in the kitchen garden this week. Which, although looks really pretty has made working the ground quite hard as it has been frozen.

The runner bean trench has now been dug, we have had to dig this quite deep as we have lots of tree roots invading the ground and we want to make sure we get them all out. This also means we have a nice deep trench to fill with lovely manure and water retaining mediums.

It has been quite a mild week considering that we are in winter. It has been very pleasant working in the garden and we have even had some lovely winter sunshine. This has made spring and the new growing season seem so much nearer now.

The kale and early sprouting broccoli are growing well we are continuing to add feed to soil around them in the form of seaweed meal, a little sprinkle every few weeks. This seems to be working well, liquid feeds this time of year just don't really get the job done as we have had so much wet weather.

The cold weather means that the woodfire is now being used in the house and we regularly collect the ash to use in the kitchen garden. The wood ash is a great helper in the garden