Winter gardens are like chilly swimming pools, refreshing and invigorating once you have taken the plunge. I like to get out in the garden most weekends, relishing the crisper air and more energetic types of winter gardening.
Keeping your vegetable beds brimful so you have an “outdoor larder” stocked for continual use works in many ways. Making sure the soil is always covered with plants helps stop nutrients being washed through the soil, and keeps the soil structure and organisms in good order.
You can grow edibles you cannot buy and, most important of all, having a wide range of vegetables and herbs means your menus become more diverse and biased in favour of greenery.
The winter vegetable garden needs a little help in the soil department. No green manures for me, though. I would rather have a productive crop and just add compost to top up organic matter. I add this whenever I change a crop and earth up and top-dress with it too.
Check your soil’s pH. The RHS is offering free soil testing of four samples (to everyone, not just members) till the end of October (see rhs.org.uk). Even on my alkaline (pH8) soil, the continual addition of compost increases the acidity, so adding lime (usually in winter) is necessary.
Having raised beds has really paid me dividends all this year and will this winter too. Never having to walk on the soil means constant rain does not prevent you planting, weeding and harvesting. Growing the plants in modules first (in cold frame or greenhouse) means the productive area is always full. Plants are tightly spaced as the well aerated soil can support good densities. Cloches, frames and fleece or polythene allow you to cover more growing space when necessary and with luck dodge adverse weather.
raised beds, below left, pay dividends in winter when you can plant, weed and
harvest without walking on the soil (MMGI MARIANNE MAJERUS)
If your beds have vacant spaces there are still plants you can add. Traditionally it was said that spring cabbage was sown in the second week of August for planting out at the end of September. But I will plant mine later as all the space is full of still productive courgettes, beans and squash.
If you have no home-produced plants, buy them in. You can just still plant sprouting broccoli, spring cabbages and 'Hispi’ (an F1 cabbage variety) if you can find them. Mail-order companies have stopped sending them out this late in the main, but Spalding Auction (01775 723333; spaldingauction.co.uk), a great hunting ground, often has them later. I recommend close-planting some spring cabbage for spring greens (15cm apart as opposed to 30cm for hearted).
Other things that can be planted, as opposed to sown, now are rhubarb and asparagus. Thompson & Morgan (thompson-morgan.com) does a good range of six-month-old asparagus crowns, including 'Ariane’, 'Mondeo’ and 'Pacific Purple’. I like to mix and match. As to rhubarb, my 'Fulton’s Strawberry Surprise’, a new virus-free plant voted most tasty in the trials at RHS Wisley, astounded me this summer. Maybe it was partly the rain, but the vigour, colour, taste and tenderness of the stems surpassed any other rhubarb I have grown.
What were known as Japanese onions, now called autumn-planting ones, will go in during October. I am also planting a new variety, 'Tornado’. These onions do not store, but give you onions from the end of June till the main crop comes. Our garlic was superb this year, with an unknown variety grown from a Spanish bulb (via a friend who lives in Spain), easily beating my others. I will shoehorn these in shortly too.
Home-grown parsnip, lettuce, beetroot and garlic all add to the variety of
your menus in the months ahead
Watercress is wonderful in the cold months. The raised outdoor bed (two square metres lined with polythene with the odd hole to allow a little drainage) is full of lush foliage. It went to seed around June. I left it and it self-seeded rapidly so I just cut down the old plants. It must be the easiest crop. My ones in pots with soil (about 50 9cm pots sitting in a shallow tray of water) in the shady part of my unheated greenhouse were burgeoning all last winter and went to seed earlier (about April). Again they self-sowed and were just left to get on with it.
With the indoor and outdoor, I have a huge, year-round supply for soups, pasta sauces and salads. Buy a packet, cut the stems to about 100mm lengths, stick them in a glass of water and they will root within a week or two. You can do it now, then plant up. In the olden days, watercress was an essential: a highly nutritious, reliable, green leaf in the winter.
As to sowing veg and herbs, there are still plenty of possibilities if you are quick and providing you have a cloche or cold frame to start them off. Top of my list is Salad burnet, Sanguisorba officinalis, recommended by the cookery writer Mary Berry. This pretty evergreen perennial herb will even pop up through snow and has a nutty, cucumber-like taste (add to salads and soups). Sow seeds now indoors and plant out as soon as the seedlings are stocky.
Coriander and chervil are brilliant herbs to use through the winter and are best sown by the end of August, but sowings under cover could still work.
Corn salad is more nutritious than lettuce and can be pepped up if you also
sow spring onion to go with it
Later spring cabbage can be sown under cover to plant out in spring. 'Fantasy F1’ red chard tastes more spinach than chard, looks great and is fast. Sow under cover and plant out under fleece if is cold. If it grows more than I need I throw the chickens the older leaves which they relish.
'Arctic King’ and 'Winter Density’ are good hardy lettuce (outside), or any of the cut-and-come-again sown under cover are great. Allow about 60 days to produce a small cut.
Corn salad is a little bland, but far more nutritious than lettuce, so sow some spring onions too to pep up.
Broad beans have suffered with me during the past two winters. I may chance it and sow some in November – if I have any room left.
My sprouts, kales, beetroot, Jerusalem artichokes, parsnips, leeks and winter cabbage are chugging along, bigger than normal because of the wet. They will all stay put and just be picked or dug up as needed. If the weather is bitter I will mulch or earth up to protect. Whatever happens, I will not go hungry.
