This week In Stephanie’s Kitchen Garden we will be continuing with our regular feeding regime. We have been feeding established crops and newly planted vegetables with fish, blood and bone or poultry manure. These need to be reapplied every six weeks during the growing season.
This week we will start spraying our espalier apples and pear tree with Epsom salts to ensure strong healthy foliage which will be more resistant to attacks from pests and diseases. We will also start feeding our greenhouse tomatoes with liquid tomato food. Many of our plants are now coming into flower and this is the ideal time to begin feeding them.
Our box hedging is looking lush and green, however elsewhere in the garden some plants are looking a little sad after the winter. This week they will be treated to foliar feed of liquid seaweed. This will be repeated every two weeks. We have had the dreaded box blight attack some of our plants n the past so keeping the plants healthy and strong is of utmost important to try and prevent any further attack. The box hedging in the Kitchen Garden has so far (fingers very tightly crossed!) never been affected and we are always very careful not to use any hedge clippers or garden tools on it that have been used in other parts of the garden. We also keep a supply of alcohol wipes in the Potting Shed to disinfect secateurs and clippers after use.
We will continue to plant out our young plants into the garden after they have been hardened off in the cold frame. There are always plenty more seedlings waiting to take their place. And we will continue to sow salads to make sure we have plenty of plants when our existing crops are done.
Also this week, our photographer will be paying their first visit of the season to take photos of our espalier apples trees and their new arch support. The trees are just bursting into blossom, which should hopefully provide some amazing shots. Look out for them in our next brochure or on our website.
This week we will be sowing Kale, swiss chard, Fennel, and Kohl Rabi.
