In the garden, with Vicky Moffitt
Our usual columnist, Caroline Beck, is up to her eyes in the garden today, which means you get me standing in for her.
It’s howling a gale today and the Kitchen Garden is officially sodden. We have rivers flowing through one of the poly tunnels, causing our pak choi to rot even though it’s in raised beds, and the ground is so wet the water is squelching up our wellies.
Our plan for 2016 has yet to be hatched but one thing we do know is there will be lots of wonderful flowers by spring. Caroline has planted gazillions of bulbs and she will be supplying our brides and grooms plus local businesses as well as our Restaurant and Tea Room where she keeps each table charged with herbs and flowers. The mission now is to make sure our hens don’t get to them! We bought two hens last year and the white mother is beautiful. My seven-year-old decided to leave her to sit on her eggs and 21 days later she hatched 14 beautiful chicks. We now have eight hens and a cockerel but it’s so muddy their glorious white feathers are caked.
We have only had the Kitchen Garden in hand since spring 2015, when we unexpectedly took it over. Last year, we planted far too many plugs all in one go and had so much kohlrabi we were giving it away. We even wondered about a kohlrabi-wanging competition, but thought it might end in tears.
We had oodles of rainbow chard all at the same time, and the tomatoes, while ever so pretty, tasted of very little indeed.
This year we’re going to grow multi-talented vegetables that are brave enough for our unreliable climate. There will be kale, which is awesome, and sprouting broccoli – the one that starts harvesting in autumn is amazing.
There will be celeriac, which is delicious and grows well here, and courgettes, which grow like stink and are so versatile – sautéed with garlic so they still have their bite, ‘spaghetti’d’, and in tartlets, breads, cakes, you name it. You can even stuff their flowers.
There will be lettuce, and potatoes, which went fantastically well last year. I think they are pink fir apple, if not they are very similar, and we are using them in every element of the business, as wedges, with Sunday lunch, in tarts, for potato salad, as well as selling them in the shop here.
We will try tomatoes again, just because I love the whole reassuring routine of tweaking out those little shoots and winding them round the string – and they look so pretty! And cucumbers – I love seeing them growing and have an obsession with dill pickle gherkins (preserving in general, actually) so this year I would love to grow pickling cucumbers, if such a thing exists.
It’s the first proper year for our weddings and we can’t wait to see Caroline’s garden in bloom and have her edible flowers for decorating the feasting boards, and the new shoots on the willow feathering out, seeing them lit up at night with the fairy lights.
We have yurts (circular tents) coming to Vallum this year too. Our yurt guests can buy our farm gate eggs, sausages and bread for breakfast and harvest their own veg in the garden for their campfires.
So, it might be bleak today, but spring is around the corner, and it is that contrast in season that I love – bleak brown dormant and then suddenly – pop – everything bursts the most vivid green. Peas! We are definitely growing peas!
