Busy planning for the year ahead
I've been busy this month preparing a new planting plan after ordering seeds, onion sets and seed potatoes from our suppliers. We put the plan on display on site for our visitors.
This month we've started sowing seeds in small trays/modules, such as Lettuce ‘Merveille des Quatre Saisons’, Lettuce ‘Red Salad Bowl’ as well as Kale ‘Ragged Jack’ and garlic chives (alson known as Chinese chives). We'll continue sowing these into early March.
I like to grow some heritage crops, because this is a traditional Kitchen Garden. One interesting (local) potato which I intend to use again from saved stock this year is the ‘Gloucester Black Kidney’. It is a blue main crop, which withstood the blight last year.
I mainly grow crops for use in the garden’s restaurant, which can be harvested and freshly used on the day. These include modern varieties of organic seed potatoes – we are trying out the blight resistant ‘Toluca’ and ‘Sarpo Axona’ this year. The restaurant likes lettuce, decorative salad leaves (later in the season), parsley, chives and dill. We grow a wide range of pumpkins – many of which are used to make warming winter soups.
We have also just started forking in our green manure crops in the main borders in the Kitchen Garden - the snowy and frosty weather here at the Rococo Garden has limited access onto the borders. Over winter we use green manure crops to reduce surface erosion. We tried three different crops this year. The winter tares (Vicia sativa) suffered in the cold weather, the field beans (Vicia faba) did quite well, but the Hungarian grazing rye (Secale cereale) was the most successful (see left), so this would be a good choice to include in the future.
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