In the northern hemisphere Spring is coming.  The snowdrops and crocuses have in many places already burst out into flower.  Maybe this has set your mind working, and you’re wondering what to do with that spare plot of earth at the back of your house.  Well how about a vegetable garden?

Vegetable gardening for flavour

I’m not sure whether it really is true, in any scientifically provable way, that my home-grown veggies from the kitchen garden taste better than what my wife buys in the local store, but I know it feels that way.  There’s certainly something special about eating what you’ve grown yourself.  What’s more, you know it’s fresh; you picked it yourself just an hour or so ago.  And if you have children in the household they will know that food does not come from a plastic bag but from God’s good earth.

How was it grown?

Personally I’m not opposed to chemicals.  Why?  Because everything we eat is chemical.  Even the cleanest air we breath is chemical.  The freshest, most unpolluted water we drink is chemical.  The materials of our bodies are chemical. The green leaves of a plant are chemical.  It’s not that chemicals are bad in themselves, otherwise everything around us would be bad, but it’s a question of what kinds of chemicals.  Plants need food, and they often need protection from pests and diseases. When you grow your food yourself you know exactly what has been used to fertilise the soil, what has been used to guard the growing crops from insect damage and plant disease.  The uncertainties are removed.  You know what you’re giving your family to eat.

Good food and good exercise

For many of us our modern lifestyle does not make it easy to keep our bodies in good condition.  Obesity and slack muscles are all too common these days.  Half an hour a day looking after a kitchen garden can make a major difference to a person’s physical fitness.  The variety of movement involved exercises many different muscular groups including legs, arms, back and more.  It won’t be long before you start to feel the difference.

So why not?

Whether you’re looking for more flavourful food, trying to save the planet or aspiring after a better-toned body, a vegetable garden could do you good. Spring is coming. It’s time to be clearing the earth and sowing the seed. You’ll not regret it.

Tags: Kitchen Garden, Spring, vegetable garden

When we moved into our present house I was adamant that I wanted a kitchen garden. It didn’t have one, but with a bit of effort I managed to get family agreement to digging up the part of the lawn area outside my study window. It’s been a great blessing. (See here just a few of the crops we’ve produced from it). And now this makes it possible for me to participate in a practice which has been popular here in England for getting on towards four hundred years. That is, it’s mid-February (2008) and I’m about to sow my tomato seeds.

I suppose those early Spanish conquerors of Peru could not have guessed that their transportation of this red fruit to Europe would result centuries later in a major international food industry and a widespread kitchen gardening hobby. After all, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many people still believed that tomatoes were poisonous and grew the plants for decoration.

So then, which varieties shall I sow this year. I usually grow a few of the small and juicy Gardener’s Delight, but in recent years I’ve lost a lot of the outdoor plants to blight so am going for a change this year. A couple of years back I grew some Ailsa Craig, which gives a medium-sized fruit with great flavour and although I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that it’s blight-resistant my experience with it then was very good so I’m planning to have some this year in the greenhouse and few outdoors as well.

On the larger side I’m thinking of a return to Costoluto Fiorentino, a great Italian beefsteak variety with fruits anything up to four inches across. At the smaller end of the spectrum I’ve sometimes grown the bush tomato Balconi Red, and the cherry-sized fruits have been beautifully flavoured. Unfortunately, though, I find it such an ugly plant so this year I’m switching back to another bush variety, Garden Pearl, with which I had good success a couple of years ago growing them in plastic troughs with the plants about fifteen inches apart. Moving away now from the red varieties I think I might give blacks a miss this year, but do plan to sow some Golden Sunrise to give a little colour variety to the summer salad plate.

I’ll not turn this into an article about tomato fertilisers, but I’m hoping to experiment a little with fertilising this year. Mind you, nothing quite matches the fruits my grandfather used to produce in the 1950s. Those were the days when the milkman, the coalman and lots of others still delivered their goods from horse-drawn carts. Grandad would be out at any opportunity shovelling up the manure. I never did quite work out what else he put into the mix, but certainly his tomatoes were fed with water from a forty gallon barrel into which had gone great shovels of horse manure, soot from the chimney sweep and who knows what else. Completely unscientific, maybe, but what results! I was only about ten years old at the time, but can still almost taste the fruit as I think about it now.

Just what nutrients I’m going to feed into the compost for my tomato-growing buckets this year I haven’t yet decided. For the time being I’ll focus on the germination stage.

Click here to buy tomato seeds on-line

And here’s a very special guide to tomato growing from Australian authors whose advice has helped both hobbyist and professional tomato growers around the world.

I’ve two main points today, one relating to our general gardening site; the other to our specialist fuchsia site. Gardening-notes.com now has some additional shop pages for (i) Plants and Seeds and (ii) Raised Beds.

As Spring approaches (although given the temperatures these past few days one might be excused for thinking this to be along way off! ) the mind has to turn to seeds. A week or two ago I dug out my small seed trays and propagator, and gave them a good wash. They’re now ready for sowing and placing in my heated propagator cabinet. It’s around this time that I usually sow my tomatoes so as to give them a good start and get an early Summer crop in the greenhouse. I know that many people will have sown their onions at the end of December, especially if there’s any intention of growing for size and exhibiting in the local shows, but mine are simply for transplanting outside in the garden and growing for general family consumption, so about now is OK.

While we’re thinking about the vegetable garden it’s worth mentioning also that we’ve now included a shop section on raised bed equipment. You can, of course, build your own from timber, brick or other materials but many people like to buy ready-made structures so we’ve added this page to point to some useful products. Gardening-Notes.com also has an article on raised bed gardening.

The-Fuchsia-File, our specialist fuchsia site, is steadily growing. I still have to find more photographs to illustrate the various cultivars for which there are separate pages, but the written content is being added without waiting for these. Recent hardy fuchsia additions includes cultivars such as Preston Guild, Army Nurse, Empress of Prussia, Hawkshead and Sleepy.

That’s all for this time/ Enjoy your preparations for the coming Spring.

- David -

I’ve been promising for some weeks but things have gone very slowly. It’s a much reduced version compared with the one I’d intended to upload around now. I’ve been working very slowly recently. Click here for www.the-fuchsia-file.co.uk

It currently has brief notes on a dozen cultivars which I wrote in a relaxed style while staying with my son at Christmas time. There are some others drafted at that time still to be checked, and these should be added quite soon. Also, I’m planning to add more photos very shortly.

On the site you’ll also find links to fuchsia books, and on the home page I highlight a DVD on fuchsia cultivation produced by Thompson & Morgan in the UK. (I’ll try to find an equivalent DVD for our North American visitors shortly).

That’s it for now. Enjoy the new site as it develops,

- David -