Your kitchen garden through the seasons
Spring
This is the time to get your growing year started. From late winter, prepare your seedbeds and start sowing tomatoes and chillies under cover, early carrots in boxes, and early peas and broad beans outdoors. Also start chitting early potatoes. Within a few weeks, you’ll be pricking out and potting up seedlings, so make sure to check progress.
Protect early fruit flowers from sharp frosts and get supports (canes, pea sticks, netting) ready for climbing crops. Early harvests include forced rhubarb, sea kale, chicory and asparagus. Keep an eye out for weeds.
Summer
Start watering in earnest – monitor containers – and apply liquid feeds. Key tasks include thinning tree fruitlets, ventilating greenhouses, looking out for pests and diseases, and weeding. Make the last sowings of crops such as winter carrots and chard, thin out spring sowings, and plant out winter brassicas and leeks. Summer-prune trained fruit, tie in fan-trained trees and earth up maincrop potatoes. Start picking crops such as cherries, currants, figs, garlic, gooseberries, nectarines, peaches, raspberries, strawberries and tomatoes.
Autumn
Your main tasks will be harvesting crops – such as orchard fruits, dessert grapes, perpetual strawberries, maincrop potatoes, onions and chillies – and clearing beds – pull up tomatoes, cut back Jerusalem artichokes and asparagus, prune and tie in summer raspberries, and harvest autumn ones.
You can still be sowing plants such as overwintering broad beans, and planting out shallots, onions, garlic and hardy leaves in modules for glasshouse harvests. Sow green manures, add organic mulches to beds, and order seeds, tubers and bare-root fruit.
Winter
There’s still plenty to do in the garden, with pruning apples and pears, as well as cane and bush fruit. Plant bare-roots, and harvest winter brassicas, leeks and hardy crops under glass. Target overwintering weeds, turn compost heaps and clear fallen leaves.
Maintenance tasks include cleaning pots, trays and labels, clearing and repairing greenhouses, sheds and fruit cages, servicing tools, checking the viability of old seed packets, inspecting propagators, and stocking up on compost, fertilisers and sundries. Be sure to reflect on your successes and failures, so you can make plans for next year.