Gardens get scruffy over winter and I thought that I’d brave the cold and get some exercise. I trimmed the spinach and chard; they both had quite a few old and semi eaten leaves. Hopefully they’ll take the hint and produce some new leaves to eat. I’ve put slug pellets down as the little blighters get everywhere. The winter cabbages are coming on but the cauliflowers look pretty weedy.

Talking of tidying up, I need to go through my seed packets and decide what to plant and what to swap.

One of the lovely things about growing your own vegetables is eating them. Today some of our vegetables spent less than a minute or two in the kitchen before being made into this salad (and we’re talking about food yards here). All of my salad recipes are here.

I’m trying to make sure that we have vegetables this winter and so I’ve been planting up swiss chard (Fordhook Giant), lettuce (winter crop) and spinach (giant winter). I’ve also planted a row of mixed salads, including rocket.

We’ve just eaten the last of the broad beans, I’ll definitely sow some more late this autumn for next year.

This year July is wet but sunny and hot when not raining.

Tags: salad, legumes

I’ve spent today tidying up ready for the plant swap afternoon tomorrow. Where I’ve sown seeds and they haven’t germinated, I’ve been sowing new seeds. That’s for spinach, beetroot, carrot and parsnip. The parsnip is coming up in the big bed; they’re just a bit gappy. There’s no sign of carrots or parnsips in the bed at the side of the garage. I probably sewed them too early.

A tip that I read is to line the trench or hole with potting compost as that’s a nicer medium for the seeds to sprout in and it makes them easy to find and water.

Tags: blog

The row of spinach that I planted on the 2nd March was a bit thin (about 4 plants poked their way out of the ground), so I’ve sown some more to bridge the gaps. I sowed a row of carrots (Paris Market) in the plot to the side of the garage. The books disagreed on when to sow, so no idea what results I’ll get. Finally, I put the last of the potatoes (Anya) into the same plot as the carrots and sowed the last few in plant pots in the greenhouse so that I get an early crop. The others that I sowed like that have started to sprout and I’m filling up the pot with earth.

Meanwhile, the cold frame is turning into a real investment (and a good present). I had my first salad leaves and a tiny radish today from there and the cabbages waiting to go into the ground are doing really well. It’s forecasting frosts this week, so I’ll wait.

We ate some of the cabbage (which is bolting) and the spinach with Sunday lunch.

It has been very mild with little rain. This meant that digging chicken waste into the new potato plot was hot work. That bed is now ready and I thought about planting some potatoes in it, but decided against it because they’re predicting frosts next week. Instead I planted 3 ‘Swift’ potatoes into a bucket in the greenhouse so that I can have some early potatoes. I also tidied up the small bed and covered it with netting to keep the cats out. Last year’s spinach is growing nicely and looked better for a bit of a tidy up.

I did plant some spinach (‘American Giant’) in the bed outside. The propagator got more pepper (‘Sweet Romano’), lettuce (‘Blonde Maraicheri’) and dwarf french bean (‘The Prince’). I moved out the carrots (‘Paris Market’) because nothing seemed to be happening with them and I want to get as much of a throughput as I can through the propagator.

I also bought another gooseberry plant to go with the other one behind the greenhouse. I picked a red one (‘Hinnomaki Red’) which had a lot of shoots showing.

Tags: root vegetables, salad, fruit

I have been watering these carefully and (as you can see from the photograph) protecting them against slugs. They're slowly coming on and maybe we can eat some tomorrow.

Lots of gardening jobs today:

Outside

Planted spinach seeds in the small bed.
Built cane supports for the peas (which are now starting to come through)
Planted first early potatoes ("Rocket")

greenhouse

Planted "slenderette" dwarf green beans
potted up Gardener's Delight tomatoes (next stop outside in the garden at the end of April)

propagator

Planted more Rocquencourt (here's hoping)
Added more basil, only one plant came up.
Planted chilli pepper ("Anaheim"), these came free with Gardener's World

Tags: salad, herbs, root vegetables, legumes