A couple of weeks ago my mother asked me if I was putting the garden to bed for the winter. It’s a common gardening phrase, and yet I have very little understanding of what it means. It implies the garden is going to be hibernating all winter, which isn’t true for a well-designed ornamental garden, and certainly isn’t true for a kitchen garden. Perhaps it means the gardener is going to be hibernating all winter, and the garden needs to be prepared for a long, untended stint? It can’t be about getting the kitchen garden ready for winter, I have been doing that all year.
I was thinking about my winter planting plan when I was putting my spring planting plan together. It’s true, this year, that I didn’t sow all of my winter crops seeds in spring – in spring only half the garden was finished. So this year I have taken an easier route, and I bought plants for purple sprouting broccoli, flower sprouts and leeks over the summer. They’ve been planted out and growing strongly for months, though. It’s true that I’ve only just managed to put the overwintering onions in, and the the garlic bed is still waiting to be planted (fingers crossed I can do that today; I broke a toe on Thursday and I’ve been hobbling about all weekend).
There’s still time to sow three winter wondercrops – broad beans, grey shallots and winter lettuce. I sowed my broad beans earlier in the month, and they’re germinating now, in the shed. There are signs of life in the onion bed, which I planted at the same time. Last weekend I took some rosemary cuttings and re-staked the purple sprouting broccoli. Three of the plants have got very big and their puny canes weren’t doing any good at all.
We are forecast a proper cold snap this week, which is good news in some
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