Kitchen Gardener Rob Smith is busy po ering and planting away
The frosts will soon be over so it's full steam ahead with the crops
With the last frost hopefully having passed in many parts of the UK, gardeners around the country will be sowing and planting directly into the soil in anticipation of bumper crops later in the year, especially if food prices could be on the up. With this in mind I’ve grown more potatoes this year than ever before as they’re easy to grow and keep for months – a perfect ‘grow your own’ crop if you have space in the garden, or even if you don’t, you can grow them in buckets.
My maincrop potatoes, which were planted in animal drinking troughs (with holes drilled for drainage), need to be earthed up as they begin to grow; just make sure you don’t damage the growing tips of the plants when you tip compost or garden soil into your containers. Keep repeating the process as the plants grow until there’s no more space for compost; this should ensure bumper crops.
Keep an eye on your onions and garlic as you wander around the garden as they can start to send up flower spikes that will divert the plants’ energy from forming nice big bulbs. Onion flowers need to be cut to remove them, whereas garlic ‘scapes’ can be held at the base and gently pulled from the plant.
Both can be used and eaten as spring onions, with the latter having a garlic taste. In fact, in the Mediterranean garlic scapes are a delicacy and highly sought after, so don’t throw them on the compost heap, take them to the kitchen. Finelychopped scapes mixed through scrambled eggs is divine.
Asparagus are cropping quicker than I can eat them, but they'll still benefit from a feed with seaweed liquid and a good water, especially if you haven't had any rain in a while; this will keep plants cropping well for the next couple of weeks and produce thick stems, as thin ones can be a sign of inadequate water.
If you’re going to grow runner beans, you can start sowing them directly into well manured or composted ground as long as it’s not cold and wet. I created a bean ‘pit’ (similar to a bean trench, but round) for my plants as I want them to grow up one of my bean towers that I placed over the pit after it was filled with kitchen composting waste over winter. Runner bean seeds can be
started now and should be poking through the soil in around 14 days, so if you live in an area that’s still experiencing/expecting a frost, you may want to wait a week or so before sowing. Also, depending on the local mouse population, you may need to cover the beans with old soft drinks bottles with the lids off or consider starting them off inside until they’ve germinated. This will prevent the hungry rodents from digging your seeds up. After all, with seed companies running low on stock, you don’t want to have to buy more seed! It’s time for a final tidy in the greenhouse before the tomatoes go in, so I’ve been moving all the terracotta pots into place and making sure there are no pests lurking about, especially greenfly which are already making their presence known. If you do spot any pests, it may be worth hanging a yellow sticky trap over any crops you have in the greenhouse,
just to see if you need to take further steps to be rid of them.