Stephanie's Garden Blog

We have had our first taste of spring weather over the weekend; a welcome sign that the winter will not last forever! It was but a brief reprieve and the grey skies and cold winds have returned. As February approaches, it is time to start off some early crops in the greenhouse. Impatient as ever, we sowed ours last week and now have tiny shoots of green appearing in the seeds trays in our heated propagator.

Weather permitting, it is time to start digging in the Kitchen Garden this week. As a rule of thumb, we usually pay attention to the activities of the local farmers as an indication of when it is time to begin turning over the soil and in our area, the tractors have begun to appear in the fields surrounding the garden.

January is mulching month in the Kitchen Garden and this week it will be the turn of the blueberries to get a fresh, nutritious top dressing. Most of our blueberry plants are grown in pots standing in our fruit cage. Despite the fact that we have acid soil which blueberries like, the bushes prefer to grow in pots, and this is evident every year here as the pot grown plants always fruit better than those grown in the soil.

With the remainder of the brussels sprouts now harvested, there has been lots of tidying and composting going on to get ready for another gardening year!

It's time to harvest the Christmas dinner table vegetables, from brussels sprouts to parsnips, celeriac to carrots, can't wait to tuck into all the homegrown veg!

All is quiet in the kitchen garden at the moment and we are making the most of the good weather days to mulch the bare soil with well-rotted manure or home-made compost. Over the coming months this will be broken down by the worms and the cold weather ready for digging over in the Spring.

Despite the imminent onset of winter, we are still growing vegetables in the Kitchen Garden. Our overwintering broad bean plants have just been planted out alongside the onions, garlic, spring cabbage, broccoli, and turnips and we will be sowing carrots and peas in the greenhouse this week.

Our fruit trees and bushes have all but shed their leaves and are entering the dormant stage of the growing year. Now is the time for us to give them some care and attention to prepare them for a productive season next year. This week we will be removing the old glue bands and replacing them with new ones and apply a winter tree wash.

It's time to plant out our broad bean plants in the Kitchen Garden this week. We sowed the beans a few weeks ago in rootrainers in the greenhouse, as sowing direct into the soil tends to result in well fed mice and very few plants! Once the beans plants were a good size, they were moved to the cold frame to harden off and are now ready for life outside.