MY WEEK : 4 ( 22ND JANUARY )

Hello all, I hope that you have all got through this week's weather unscathed, what a change from last week's gales and destruction to our first real taste of winter with the ground here being frozen for 3 days at least. I know many of you have had Snow as well, despite some being forecast we have not had any here at all which hasn't pleased Daniel as he has been eager to get out and play in some, probably eager to launch a snowball attack on me more like! Things are starting to get into shape here at the Kitchen Garden, we are beginning to see a bit of daylight at the end of our preparation of the walled garden area, in fact we are not too far away from our first planting and sowing with next week ( Week 5 ) being the time to sow the Aubergines and then there will be the Garlic to transplant.



The week started off with the discovery that the local mice population had spent the weekend feasting on the Sweet Pea seeds that we had sown the week before, fortunately I still had enough seeds leftover to re-sow them, this time however I have taken them home to germinate in my greenhouses which have not got a mice problem. When they are ready I will return them to the Kitchen Garden and grow them on in the cold frames until ready to transplant later in the Spring.




After sorting out the Sweet Peas the next project was to clear the shrubs from the border which runs along the side of the lawned area you can see in the photograph. There were a mixture of old Roses, Heathers and shrubs that had been neglected and left unpruned so they all had to be got rid of. The largest of the shrubs had very substantial rootballs as you can see from the photograph which needed the additional help of an axe to get through their roots, the soil in this border will need plenty of enrichment to replace the goodness that would have been taken up by the shrubs.



During the mornings when the ground was still frozen from the overnight frosts I set about pruning the dead wood out of the orange tree and also started to work my way through the many plants in the Glasshouse which needed the old growth removing and a bit of pruning. Also I took the opportunity to take a specimen of the Box hedging that had died to our local garden centre to ask their advice as to what had caused some of the plants to die. At first sight the diagnosis was that it was a condition called Box Blight which is a serious fungal disease and does not have a cure, however not wanting to be defeated I have scoured the Internet for Box specialists and eventually came across the main UK grower called Langley Boxwood, after sending them some photographs and several conversations I was pleased to hear that it was not blight and simply as a result of last years heatwaves. As you can see in the photograph above, the Box plants for unknown reasons have been planted with half of their roots actually sitting on the edges of the concrete paths and whilst not being tended very well they have simply dried out and died.



Other jobs that we have managed to get done this week include the transplanting of the perennials that we had to remove from the large vegetable bed, also the second of the Eucalyptus trees was felled and the roots were removed, the Box plants that you can see around the hole left by the removal of the Eucalyptus trees can be transplanted into the gaps that we will have when the dead plants are removed from the hedging.



Elsewhere around the Kitchen Garden I continued with pruning the Raspberry canes and Glenn and I also started to remove the turf from the other large vegetable bed, this proved trickier than expected probably due to the frosty weather and the fact that it is such a fine grass, the turf would not come away in strips. So the plan is to resume this job next week using a machine made famous by the Groundforce tv programme and that is a turf stripping machine which is basically a petrol driven knife that cuts the turf off enabling you to roll it up if so desired, the turf that we remove will be stacked up and left to breakdown into a lovely loam for use in the gardens next year.



The Garlic cloves that were potted up last week were potted up in order for them to start to produce their roots as they had started to shoot in storage, this was done as the soil in their growing position is not quite ready for them. The soil needs to be improved with Chicken manure pellets which have arrived this week and that is one of the jobs we will be carrying out next week. Also arriving this week was the first load of manure that we will be stacking up and leaving to rot down for use next Winter when it comes to improving the soil, as you may be able to see it was steaming very well and it had a good mix of hay and manure to it rather than some stables which use wood chippings/ sawdust which takes longer to rot down.


Well that is almost it for another week, I would like to say a big thankyou to a couple of my website visitors who have kindly sent me some seeds to try this year, that is some Banana Shallots and Roscoff Rose which is a sweet pink onion thankyou Shallotman & Paul Rogers. Well I must get on with writing my first article for the Grow Your Own magazine's Q&A which will appear in April's issue, I have already done the article for the Kitchen Garden's Plot Watch which will appear in March's issue, speak to you all next week, thanks Steve.