We finally had some welcome rainfall in Stephanie’s Kitchen Garden last week. The water butts are full and the ground is wet. This has freed us up from the watering regime for a while allowing us the time to catch up with other tasks. This week we will be sowing more vegetable seeds to grow plants to fill the holes that the harvest creates.
We will soon be harvesting our early potatoes and our remaining broad beans which will open up much more needed growing space. We will be sowing winter cabbages, pak choi, chard, kohl rabi, spinach and broccoli.
We will be digging over our herb parterre. The parterre is structured with box hedging which has suffered from blight in the past couple of years. The herbs inside it have become old and woody and, as we have a larger herb garden elsewhere, we have decided to replace the herbs with white flowering plants Sissinghurst-style.
We have clipped the stricken hedge back hard, cutting into the old wood and opening it up to allow air to flow through. It has also had a good feed. This approach to the blight has proven to be somewhat successful in other parts of the garden, so we are keeping our fingers crossed that it will recover. The task of digging over the soil will be a little easier now that the ground has had a good soaking, and digging will be more comfortable now that the temperatures have cooled a little. Changing and revamping areas of the garden that have gone past their best is always an exciting task and we are looking forward to the end result.
