Getting ready for a new season Preparation and picking will be keeping me busy in January
This week seems to be about preparation and picking in the kitchen garden. As the daylight hours are increasing, it’s time to think about warming beds for seed sowing and planting within the next month or so.
When warming beds, make sure not to do this if the ground is frozen solid as you’ll be trapping the cold in the soil. I like to add a thick layer of manure to the beds, then cover them in black weedsuppressant membrane to soak up the heat from the sun. I also cover some with long cloches to keep the rain off the soil, especially the beds I’m going to be sowing into in the near future. If you want to get sowing, some spinach varieties can be started inside now and planted out under your cloches in March – perfect timing if you start to warm the beds now!
Something else that needs covering is my little peach tree. Peaches, along with almonds, apricots and nectarines, can suffer from peach leaf curl if they’re left uncovered in the garden before they come into leaf. This fungal disease causes the leaves to pucker and twist, then prematurely fall, resulting in a smaller crop of fruit. I move my small kale plants to the compost heap and you’ll be rewarded with a free crop that you can’t buy in shops – and I’m sure you’ll love it.
Chard is such a cheery crop plant into the greenhouse to stop the rain getting to it (as it seems to spread in the rain), but you can cover larger plants with clear plastic or construct a shelter against a wall-trained plant. Once your plant has started producing leaves it’s fine to be uncovered or moved outside and will grow just fine.
If you sowed any sweet peas in autumn, you should have some lovely little plants now. However, to stop the plants becoming leggy and to encourage more flowers, they need to have the tops nipped off. I usually remove the top growth to leave the plants about 10cm (4in) tall, but I don’t compost the tips, I turn them into free plants! By letting your plants get a bit taller than usual before nipping them out, you can remove the tip and effectively produce a cutting. The cutting is then stripped of its lower leaves and left in a glass of water to root. Once rooted you can plant the cutting up and grow as you would a seed-grown sweet pea. By doing this you can increase the number of plants you can produce from a single seed, meaning a small packet of sweet pea seeds can go a long way!