MY WEEK : 2 ( 8TH JANUARY )

Well here I am with my update of my first week's progress at the Kitchen Garden. This is a photograph of how it looked at the beginning of the week before we started work on the project and I will show you how things progressed during the week, finishing off with how it looked at the end of the week. The weather has been very windy accross all of the UK this week, it has also been exceptionaly mild with rain at times, despite these conditions we have been able to achieve a great deal during the week, the benefits of the garden being a walled garden have meant calmer conditions within it's walls which is why they were ideal for growing many of the fruits and vegetables in the past. I have been helped tremendously by a friend of mine called Glenn from the allotments and I must say that he has really enjoyed the opportunity of being able to help on such a project. At the moment there is not much I can do at my allotments, the beds and soil are all prepared ready for the sowing and planting season to arrive. Obviously with my project at the Kitchen Garden taking up a vast amount of my time I intend to spend Monday to Friday at the Kitchen Garden and weekends at my allotments where I still intend to grow a few things but not on the same scale as last year. The interest in my project has been amazing and I will do my best to do it justice and provide you with weekly updates of my progress.





This week has also been exciting in that I have been invited to write for two well known gardening magazines, in the Kitchen Garden magazine starting with March's issue I will be contributing in a new feature called Plotwatch UK, where monthly progress of peoples progress of growing their crops in different parts of the UK will be reported on. Starting with April's issue of Grow Your Own magazine I have been asked to be their Organic Expert in their Questions and Answers feature where I will be answering reader's questions each month.






The first task of the week once I had given my friend Glenn a tour of the Kitchen Garden and the field where I intend to grow all the crops with my plans for the project, was to clear out and weed the Cedarwood Greenhouse where I will be starting the plants off before transplanting them into the open ground. I discovered that there is a fantastic Peach tree in one of the three bays of the greenhouse which you can see in the top-left picture. The bottom pictures show how it looks now, ready for production.







After the Cedarwood Greenhouse had been sorted out we made a start on the largest of the growing areas within the Kitchen Garden, the soil is in good condition as you would expect from many years of cultivation, however due to neglect over the last few years it has a mass of couch grass and bindweed roots in it, the only way to deal with this problem is to dig them out . I heard from somebody during the week who had taken on an allotment and had been advised to rotorvate them all in, this would have caused a major problem for her if she had gone ahead and done this. The rotorvator blades would have chopped the roots up into numerous pieces and each one of these would have then produced another weed plant and then the problem would have been many times worse, the only effective way to get rid of them is to dig out as many of them as possible and when the few that you will inevitably miss re-grow you should then dig them out as well, after a while you will have rid your soil of all the perennial weeds and will only have the annual weeds left to contend with. The photographs below show the largest of the growing areas and the start of it's clearance which proved to be our main task of the week.






Another job that I started to tackle this week was clearing around the Raspberry canes, there is a mixture of Summer and Autumn fruiting canes however I'm unaware of the exact varieties, they have not been pruned for I don't know how long and apart from a couple of the plants you could not tell on the Summer fruiting canes which was the oldest of the wood and which was the newer, this is important as you should prune out the growth from the previous season leaving the new growth for next season's crop to fruit on. Beacause of this I had no choice in removing all the wood down to almost ground level which will greatly reduce this season's crop but will greatly improve the yield in next season crop. With the Autumn fruiting canes you do not have this problem as you just need to prune them down to ground level after they have fruited and then the new growth that comes afterwards during the Summer will produce you crop in the Autumn. On looking around the site you may have noticed that there is a great deal of Box hedging, unfortunately some of the plants have died and need to be replaced. Until I speak to a Box nurseryman/ nurserywoman I am not sure as to why some have died while others are very healthy, hopefuly we can replace them with some transplants as there are some plants that are not required elsewhere.







Before the strongest of the winds that were forecast arrived this week, I went around the Cedarwood Greenhouse making all the glass safe and secure as some of the panes were loose, the only pane that needed replacing was at the Peach tree end of the greenhouse, as you can see from the picture below I have for the time being covered the area with polythene sheeting until we can get it re-glazed. There are a couple of Eucalyptus trees that had been planted in the Kitchen Garden probably for use in flower arranging in the past as their distinctive blue/grey leaves are beautiful. However due to them not being pruned for the last few years they have grown much taller than the wall that surrounds the Kitchen Garden, this has meant that with all the gales that we have had over the last few months they have been caught ny the cross winds and their roots have become unstable, so we will need to fetch them down unfortunately for our own safety, the picture below gives you an idea of our situation.





Well as promised I said that I would show how we got on with clearing the largest growing bed and here is how the bed looked when we finished our first week at the Kitchen Garden,






I think that you will agree with me in saying that we have made a huge difference in a short space of time and this area will be completed next week ready for the first of the crops to be planted in early to mid February.

Well that is about it for my first week at the Kitchen Garden, it has been very hard work but very rewarding and exciting, sat in my office area with a cup in one hand thinking of all the previous gardener's that have been in my position during the last 100-200 years that the Kitchen Garden has probably existed in the Hall's 702 year history, an absolutely humbling and amazing feeling, I have inserted a slideshow below with other images of the last week for you to enjoy, I will speak to you all again next week regards Steve.