Stephanie's Garden Blog

At last we have had a taste of spring in the Kitchen Garden, with a few days of warm sunny weather arriving in East Anglia. It has been warm enough to leave the greenhouse door open allowing vital ventilation around the plants. The autovents on the greenhouse windows have even nudged the windows open in the warmth of the winter sunshine.

All around the garden new growth is slow to emerge this year. Snowdrops are a good month later than we would normally expect to see them in flower and the daffodils are only just beginning to peek through the soil. In the Kitchen Garden overwintering crops are surviving under their cloches and fleece covers, but showing no sign of new growth.

February always signals the start of the new growing year for us in the Kitchen Garden, despite the fact that we already have some seedlings growing in the heated propagator and overwintering crops both inside and outside the greenhouse. This week we will be sowing rocket, spinach and chard in seed trays in the greenhouse. We will also be sowing peas in rootrainers which can be grown on for planting outside or eaten as delicious pea shoots in salads.

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.