Have you started to prepare your garden for the next season??? My raised beds are covered with black plastic after we have dug in some well rotten compost. And we started to plan our next steps already. I gave Mr T. a wonderful Christmas gift (very selflessly I may add) – and he is now the proud owner of several garden books, a heated propagator and a selection of seeds (all nicely stacked in a box). Over the last few weeks we have flipped through the pages and 100s of ideas popped up. Obviously, as we are both working, most of them went back to the idea pot which we keep in case we do win the jackpot. When planning your kitchen garden, make sure that you can handle it. Nothing is more of a waste if you have prepared a bed nicely with some great vegetables and then you won’t have the time to actually care for it. Also, how much will you be able to eat? Can you store the vegetables? Can you preserve the food?
All these decision will determent the success of your kitchen garden.
So far we have decided on tomatoes (Mr T. was busy cleaning and preparing the greenhouse – the same attention is needed in the greenhouse as for the outside beds), carrots (we haven’t been very lucky last year), onions (still the easiest vegetable to grow), potatoes (after all we are Irish), red cabbage (I just love it), white cabbage (Mr T. is a bacon & cabbage man), pumpkin, courgettes to name just a few.
As I love cooking, the vegetables above will come in handy and all of them can be preserved in one way or another. I will be posting photos about the progress – let me know how you get on.
Watch this space as I am organising a garden talk with garden expert Kitty Scully (of RTE ‘How to Create a Garden) for tips and tricks.
