The springtime potager

You could almost call this aerial photography. I took these shots leaning out the window of the office at the far end of the farmhouse. The wooden building you see in the shots that we added on to the stone part (21st century to 16th).

That has always been the curse of this working farm. The vegetable production is slap bang in the middle of the action.

Sit out at the table in the courtyard and you are forced to look down onto the beds.

Walk through parts of the garden and you get a glimpse.

No escape.

So I have always worked at finding ways to have vegetables growing all year.

The kale do that job beautifully.

I’m still harvesting. Good old cavolo Nero, and Hungry Gap, and the Russian red varieties.

I’m letting some of the smaller of these plants go to seed so I can collect and resow.

But one bed is still in full production. So full that I had to do a some serious work on the netting as the cabbage white butterflies have hatched and are zooming about.

You can just glimpse the wonky frames in the background there of the one bed I want to preserve from caterpillars.

And in this first bed you might be able to see the carpet of lettuce. Self-seeding merveilles de quatre saisons.

Fab plant. If I am diligent I will lift the seedlings as they emerge and distribute them more evenly in other beds.

Otherwise it’s just pick the leaves wherever they are crammed the most and you can eat salad almost all winter and spring.

They will bolt soon as it starts to warm up. But that’s fine. I just leave them flowering and dispersing their seed and going again.

The next bed up has self seeding fennel (bronze fennel fronds I use in flower arranging), self seeded gladiolus byzantinus. The corms are easily two feet down in the raised beds, so a devil to actually extract.

The next bed along has a crop of self-seeded parsnips that will definitely come out when I need the room. But it shades the kale. And saves me from staring down at brown mulch.

And what’s that odd thing with the curves?

That’s the green manure pea crop enriching the soil from the collected mole hill product further down the mountain.

The slugs are going at them as we have had so much rain; but I should get some mangetout here before I decide what crop to grow next.

I’ll keep the curving theme (too many straight lines in these raised beds) by planting cucumbers and rows of basil in these beds later.

And I have a second curving pea and broad bean structure in the bed closest to the lawn and the rose hedge.

Pause for me to have a good rummage.

And curses, I don’t have any shots of this bed on my camera roll. Normally I would just duck out in my pjs and snap a shot. But I’m in London and it will have to wait. Which is a shame as the crimson flowering broad beans are quite the picture.

Have a shot of the top beds instead. Lots of raspberry and gladiolus going on here. Self-seeded chard and marjoram. And the dahlias poking their heads. I have little sticks everywhere to mark where I planted out.

I have all these dahlias potted up to go in once I can see what has survived the winter / rodent attack.

Also new for 2025 is an addition at the front of the potager; what I call the soft fruit area.

Here are the dozens of jostaberry and currant bushes.

I had to add a landscape fabric between the shrubs as I just can’t control the weeds.

Well I could. But by the time they are a problem it’s July and I’ve lost the will to live. Plus there is a pernicious crop of bindweed here. And I can only control that with a physical barrier.

But I can roll back the fabric on the area that is shaded by an oak.

And this was where I decided to add 12 more dahlia plants. Which you can barely see as the almost fruiting currants are muscling into the picture.

It’s an experiment to see if the dappled shade of the oak (without the irksome roots as the oak grows one terrace below) will mean I have summer dahlias.

And in case you are curious – so far no slugs or snails lurking under the fabric rolled back at the edges. I have been checking obsessively each day. Plus the dahlia leaves are now at that unpalatable tough stage, so all I need fear now is a hail storm and the arrival of the deer ….

Must remember to shut the gate on the potager each night. I do sometimes forget and clench with fear of a morning.

What devastation awaits?