Stephanie's Garden Blog

Last week was certainly a week of a mixture of weather. Monday was another warm, dry day and being able to get into the shade was wonderful but the lavender bushes all needed their Autumn trim. When you have quite a few the use of a petrol hedge trimmer is brilliant, remembering to take the new growth right down to where the old wood is, so next year you will get good healthy growth and flowers.

A short week for workers this week but the kitchen garden continues to grow. Although, since the last heavy rain it has started to feel a little autumnal in the mornings; a chilly and sometimes dewy start but warming up during the day.

This week, after almost six years, I am leaving Stephanie's Garden to move on to a new garden and new challenges. As any gardener who has ever left a garden they have loved (whether through work or through house move) will know, it is a bitter-sweet time. Having loved and nurtured a garden for a long time it is so difficult to leave it.

For the first time in a long time my first priority wasn't more watering when I went out to the kitchen garden this morning. Yesterday we had an inch of rain which has left the garden feeling refreshed and the plants have lifted their drooping heads and you can almost hear them growing.

The cordon tree is something like the gardener's victory over the tree. Here, the domesticated tree no longer pushes itself self-determined toward the light, but the gardener dictates where it grows with this step over support.

Setting up a store cupboard full of your own home-produced preserves is such a marvellous way to capture the full flavour of what you have grown that it far surpasses anything you can ever buy in a supermarket.

Well the promised storms by the weather forecasters have finally arrived and we've had a few heavy showers to keep the garden ticking over. It had been been 8 weeks since we had any rain in the Kitchen Garden and the temperatures over the past week has been in the 30's every day so these showers are very welcome.

Harrod Horticultural are looking for a part-time kitchen gardener (minimum 20 hours per week, flexible to support business needs), to work in their private garden in the Somerleyton area.

This week we are going to be planting out broad beans for autumn harvesting. We have never grown them for autumn harvesting before and are very excited to see how they perform. We have a large space where our disastrous onions and garlic grew and that we had originally earmarked for our leeks. Given our white rot problems we couldn?t use it for leeks so decided to give autumn broad beans a try.