The big spring tour continues to the Kitchen Garden

Thank you for joining me on this little tour. I hope you enjoyed the Courtyard and Cottage Gardens? Now, we're making our way round to the East-side!

Warm ground, dirty hands, happy gardener

There’s something grounding about stepping into the Kitchen Garden. You approach it through a narrow, shady passageway, leaving behind the bright whites, curated charm and heady fragrance of the Courtyard. Then, quite suddenly, the view opens up - broad, practical, sunlit, with a dilapidated fence held aloft by ivy! It’s a space with purpose: open beds, straight lines, and the quiet promise of productivity. But there’s still magic here, just of a different kind.

More than anywhere else in the garden, this is where reality bites hardest. Plans are often rewritten by weather. Dreams can be flattened by hail, scorched by late frosts, or steadily devoured by slugs. (Last year was wholesale slaughter!) And yet, this is also where satisfaction runs deepest - because here, you get to eat what you grow, so grow what you want to eat!

The Kitchen Garden is where modest beauty shakes hands with practicality - and where I most often find myself with grubby hands, a sun-warmed back, and pockets inexplicably full of plant labels, seed packets, and an improbable length of 3-ply twine.

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Vegetable gardens needn’t be ugly. I took my time, thinking through the layout, diligently marking out the beds, squinting at the sun to track its arc, like some well-meaning sundial, then realising I had an app to do that for me (PhotoPills). I wanted the most growing space possible without making it feel like a grid of obligation. The paths had to be wide enough for a barrow run to the compost bays (which, let’s be honest, see a lot of traffic), and I measured more than once to be sure I could actually reach the middle of each bed without falling in.

Then came the big question: how much space do I really need to grow enough food? The answer depends entirely on who's asking. If it’s my partner, the answer is always, “just a bit more than I have.” But the truth? I probably have too much. I definitely grow too much. And I really ought to accept that one of the beds will inevitably be claimed for her dahlias.

And of course, the final flourish: what colour to paint the woodwork? It’s a subtle ‘Muted Clay’ grey for now (sensible and polite) but I keep dreaming of something bolder. Maybe a dash of purple, or a splash of bright sky blue. Something cheerful enough to distract me when the brassicas bolt.

From the beginning, I always planned to grow flowers in and among the vegetables - partly for the whispered promise of companion planting benefits, but mostly because I like things to look beautiful while they’re being useful. Something to soften the edges. Something for the bees and beneficial insects. A sacrificial distraction for the cabbage white butterfly. A dash of colour and floof to keep the whole thing from taking itself too seriously.

Some favourites return year after year: rich orange Calendula ‘Indian Prince’; a tumble of cheerful nasturtiums that wander wherever they please; I’ll drop in feathery fennel and starry borage; add a scattering of Cosmos ‘Sonata’; and let the chives and the umbels (coriander, parsley, chervil) go to flower when the time is right. It’s a kind of managed chaos, and the pollinators seem to approve.

The morning sun climbs over our neighbour’s vast and unruly Leylandii hedge, casting its first golden light here. In winter, the whole garden lies in deep shade, but as the year turns, the shadow line slowly retreats - revealing the raised beds, warming the soil, coaxing it toward spring.

Late winter | Early Spring Mulch | Summer

From a mid-February sowing, the planting begins in late March. The crops grow daily. You can almost hear the quiet tick of progress - slow, steady, full of intent. The neat rows, still a little bare, hum with promise. The kind only gardeners truly understand: the joy of what ‘will be’, and what will one day be ‘on my plate’.

Right at our feet is what I generously call the Cutting Garden. A quiet testament to patience and compost. This patch used to be a weedy mess with proper thugs! I didn’t dig it over; I just let a black tarp do the hard work, leaving it in place for a year to smother the weeds. I wasn’t in a rush.

Each year since, I’ve layered spent compost from my spring bulb pots and planters, and now, the soil is rich, dark, and crumbly - a good loam, and all without any digging. It’s the kind of low-effort success story that makes you smile every time you walk past.

At the moment, being so early in the season, it’s more “area of horticultural potential” than a parade of blooms. The remnants of last year’s ambition have just been cleared, though a few fragile blades of gladioli are already attempting a comeback - poking hopefully through the compost, as if no one told them the party’s over.

Last summer saw rows of absolute dynamite Larkspur (seed from

Marlston Farmgirl

), standing tall and triumphant. The dahlia tubers, sourced from reputable suppliers, were another story… a rather woeful array of feeble flowering efforts that barely made it into the vast array of Wedgewood pottery, let alone polite applause. It was a cool and dreary summer, so it’s no wonder they dragged their feet.

It’s a humble little plot, this one. But hope springs eternal - or at least every February when the seed catalogues arrive. This year, I’ve got a clearer plan (and, crucially, more netting). There will be rows of dark blue Midnight Mix larkspur, pale yellow Straw Foxgloves, Cosmos ‘Apricotta’, and loosely planted clouds of Nigella hispanica, with their delicate, feathery fronds and fascinating seed pods. I’m sowing mignonette for its white spires and gloriously sweet scent, and the mophead hydrangeas, already rooted along the front edge, will (fingers crossed) offer up their blousy drama by late summer, cut fresh or dried.

Lavender lines the path like a hopeful little hedge, offering scent, structure, and a place for the bees to exchange their latest gossip. Grown from seed, they’ve done well, but they’re starting to look a bit weary. Lavender is short-lived and some of these are ready to bow out. I’ll be pulling out the weakest soon and replacing them, most likely, with erigeron. Not because it’s a grand design decision, but because I’ve got a few big pots of it lying around. Sometimes, that’s just how it goes. Opportunistic gardening at its finest!

If all goes well, by midsummer this scrappy patch will be spilling over with colour, and I’ll be stuffing vases with bunches and posies like a faffing florist on a flower show deadline. Or, at the very least, I’ll have something to pick that isn’t bindweed!

Just to your right is my DIY log store—but let’s not get distracted. Up the path are the six timber-raised beds that make up the core of the Kitchen Garden. Together, they give me 27m² (290ft²) of growing space. The first bed, which gets a bit of afternoon shade, is home to my salad crops: lettuces, rocket, spinach, and chives, alongside a couple of rows of beetroot, carrots, and broad beans. At the far end, closest to the compost bays, onions and potatoes are getting settled in.

Two of the beds are already strung up with pea netting, tied and stapled to chunky wooden stakes, ready for the peas that are just beginning to scramble up. There’s still some empty space for now, but give it another month and these beds will be full: tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, courgettes, and a good handful of dahlias thrown in for good measure, along with all those flowers for floof!

A peek behind the scenes

Zig-zagging through the raised beds, where bare soil belies the magic beneath, the path leads to one of the garden’s most quietly heroic corners: the compost area. Four compost bays sit side by side, gently decaying in stages like a slow-motion magic trick.

They’re cobbled together from salvaged timber, pallets, and good intentions - each one in a slightly different state of respectable disarray. A fifth bay, dedicated to leafmould, rests quietly at the far end: slow, dignified, and requiring little from me but patience and the occasional approving glance, as if I’m silently acknowledging a monk deep in leafy contemplation.

They’re not much to look at, unless you’re the sort who gets emotional about humus (and if you are, we should absolutely have a beer together), but to me, they’re the beating heart of the garden. They steam on cold mornings, sigh with the scent of damp transformation, and occasionally burst into surprise daffodils that refuse to accept their composted fate.

It’s not glamorous. No one’s penning love poems to rotting cabbages, but there’s something deeply comforting about it. This is where the garden’s storylines reach their final act. Every faded bloom, bolted lettuce, and rage-yanked fistful of bindweed ends up here, tossed unceremoniously into what I fondly call “The Great Mulch Beyond!”

And from this theatrical heap of endings comes the good stuff. Every barrowload of crumbly, glorious homemade mulch I spread across the beds is a deeply satisfying little dirty-fingernailed triumph. Proof that in this garden, nothing is ever truly wasted - not the failures, not the leftovers, not even the weeds (roots and all).

At the moment, one of the bays is empty as I’ve just finished spreading its crumbly riches over the raised beds like a proud pastry chef dusting icing sugar. Two others are full and quietly doing their thing (composting is, after all, mostly a matter of being left alone), and the fourth is actively being filled.

Between the winter prunings, the first mow, and a recent ambush of spring weeds, that 1.2m³ (1.5yd³) bay is already half full and merrily humming along at 40°C (104°F), which is deeply satisfying to my inner compost nerd (honestly, I’ve checked the temperature more than I check the weather). Sometimes, when I linger here while having a moment (usually leaning on my fork, catching my breath after turning a heap), I glance back toward the raised beds and allow myself a sweet little daydream:

Just there, beside the beds, I imagine a greenhouse. Not just any greenhouse, mind you, but the proper kind: misted glass, worn brick base, tools hanging just-so, shelves lined with terracotta pots, a whiff of nostalgia and the soft scent of damp compost and musky tomatoes curling in the air. A place of slight disorder and buckets of promise.

In reality? It's currently a patch of nettles and rubble, home to a buddleia that refuses to die, a rogue bucket, and a mollusc militia quietly planning their shelled uprising. But gardeners are nothing if not seasoned romantics with muddy boots and excellent imaginations and big hearts filled with hope. One day, perhaps. Until then, the conservatory will have to play understudy.

The wild edge

Before we wander off, let’s just take a moment to marvel (gawp) at the embankment. It’s hard to miss, stretching 60 meters long and rising up to five meters high (that’s 196 feet by 16 feet, if you’re counting). It’s massive. Honestly, I’ve got no real plan for it. Any attempt at formal landscaping would verge on civil engineering. So, I left it be… and in return, it’s become a haven.

What was once just a daunting slope is now a wildlife garden in its own right. It bursts with spring bulbs, native wildflowers, and grassy tussocks. Ivy trails down the bank like green boot-laces, and it’s become a favourite haunt for frogs! (No idea why, but as long as they’re scoffing slugs I do not need to know) The embankment soil is a honeycomb of tiny burrows, home to bumblebees and bank voles, and it’s a regular hunting ground for the resident tawny owl, who seems quite pleased with the free takeaway arrangement.

It’s not a space I fuss over much. The whole bank is only cut twice a year, and aside from a bit of bindweed control (mercilessly ripped out by hand every time I see it) it’s left to do its own thing. And you know what? That freedom suits it. It’s a beautiful, buzzing mess, full of life and surprises. I merely constrain its leading edge and jump out of my skin when a frog leaps out.

Whew—yes, it’s really warm around here! Let’s head to the Terrace for a bit of shade and a breather. Can I tempt you with a glass of something cold? A crisp rosé, a G&T, maybe an ice-cold beer? The chairs are waiting, the view’s lovely, and we’ve still got more garden to explore when you're ready?