The summer harvest continues in earnest this week in Stephanie’s Kitchen Garden and spaces are beginning to appear in our vegetable beds. We have already dug the garlic and shallots up and they are currently drying in the sunshine. This week the garlic will be plaited and hung in the larder for use over the coming months, and the shallots will be stored in vegetable bags. Our red onions are a really good size now and will soon be ready to join their counterparts in the larder. We will wait for the leaves to brown before harvesting them.
Where we create empty spaces, we will dig the ground over and prepare it for a new crop by incorporating home-made compost and farmyard manure into the soil. We currently have seed trays with small cabbage and broccoli plants that will soon be ready to plant out. We prefer to nurse these in the cold frame until they are good sized young plants before they are planted out in their final growing space.
We are picking huge bowlfuls of blueberries every few days at the moment, with plenty more fruit waiting to ripen. Surplus fruits are being frozen for future consumption along with the huge amounts of French beans that we are also harvesting at the moment. We have a large freezer and it is filling up rapidly with fresh produce to see us through the hungry gap later in the year.
In the wider gardens, it is time to prune our wisteria plants. They have put on a fantastic display this year and are currently treating us to a second flowering. This week we will be removing the new long tendrils to five or six leaves, taking care not to disturb any existing flowers or flower buds. We will also tie in any new shoots that we want to keep, to the support. We have several large wisterias, so this will take us a day, up a ladder in the sunshine.
