Kem Ormond’s vegetable garden: Winter is coming, time for green crops and cloches

Garden cloches come in all shapes and sizes. Photo / Sam Angima, Flickr

Kem Ormond is a features writer for The Country. She’s also a keen gardener. This week, she’s making plans to get her garden organised for winter.

OPINION

While I love summer and the abundance of fruit and vegetables, I must admit when the jars are filled and there is no more room in the cupboard, I am ready to start planning for my winter garden.

If your garden isn’t under snow, you can continue to plant and sow all winter.

Things grow slowly as the soil is cold but they still grow, providing a lovely continuity of delicious vegetables.

I have always grown my red cabbages in winter. Come spring, they romp away, developing into the largest and tastiest cabbages.

If you are not planting any vegetables during winter, don’t let beds sit empty and exposed to the weather.

Instead, sow a green crop to add plenty of nutrients to the soil and protect those empty beds.

Green crops help improve soil structure and provide organic nitrogen naturally.

Lupin and mustard are good cover crops to plant.

Once these have reached around 35cm in height, and before they flower, pull up the plants, chop into pieces with a spade and then dig them back into the soil.

Leave them to break down for a couple of months before you plant any new crops.

Another option I use is to lay my borage, sunflower plants (which I chop up for quicker decomposition) and sweetcorn plants over soil that will not be used till next season and top with any homemade compost I may have made on hand - a bit like making a cake!

Come early spring I will dig this over ready to use.

By feeding your soil and adding a layer of mulch to insulate over winter, keeping plants, worms, and their microbe friends happy, you will help suppress eager weeds, and your soil will be ready to produce come summer.

I do not have a tunnel house or a glass house but over the years I have enjoyed scouting out old windows and frames and ideas for making winter cold frames.

I have even made wooden structures that I have covered with recycled plastic; these are ideal when planting new seedings in winter.

They can be lifted off when the seedlings start to get too tall.

You may have some ready-purchased cloches, but a cloche can be anything from an old drink bottle with the top cut off, a glass cloche, that may have had a previous use, a wicker basket, or old plastic buckets with the bottoms cut out of them or a small plastic tunnel just wide and high enough for a row of seedlings.

A cold frame is basically a bottomless box with a skylight.

Remember a cold frame can quickly become a hot frame even on a warm winter day, so having a lid you can adjust to release the heat is important.

Having visited some lovely gardens in Europe last year, I saw some of the most beautiful terracotta cloches ever, and I would love one to use in my garden, even to force my rhubarb - and I am not even a rhubarb fan.

While I know we should use all our garden space productively, the odd bit of art in the vegetable garden is all right in my books.