An English Country Kitchen Garden in Spring

April.

It feels like the days are settling now. At the beginning there was the uncertainty, the waiting, the checking, there sheer newness and mass of the shift that happens at the start of spring. We waited and held our breath. You cannot hold your breath forever. 

Breath exists outside of your control. 

Hold your breath and your breath will exhale. 

The Hungry gap

I exhale. Nothing happens. The earth holds. The birds sing. The tulips swoon in the heat and are grateful for the rain. The spaniel snores. The days simplify, and in their simplicity find their own rhythm. Eating. Walking. Weeding. The beds are cleared in the kitchen garden, and the plugs planted out. There are butterhead lettuces and rhubarb, and the ever generous chard, but we are firmly in the hungry gap now. Wild garlic and nettle tops are made into pesto and stuffings for pasta. As the wild garlic flowers come in, they are sprinkled on salads.

I make rhubarb and stem ginger crumble. If you sieve the fruit after you have stewed it, you have the best juice for cocktails.

Making the most of space: an English country kitchen garden

What I call the kitchen garden was once the back lawn. The gap of grass between the back door and the gate to the track. I tried to copy Charlie McCormick’s garden, long thin veg beds with box balls guarding the ends. (If you do not know it, please do read this article here. Or just google it, it is astonishingly beautiful.) It didn’t really work, because my garden is sandwiched between two others, and I do not have the abundance of space here to capture that rolling, sprawling, generous, perfectly English country look. So, two years ago this May, we peeled up all of the turf, took out all the beds, every scrap of everything, and started again from scratch.

Kristy Ramage, right hand woman of Arne Maynard and one of the most talented people I have ever met, designed a kitchen garden, not for me, but for my cottage. Instead of normal beds, the hedge germanders mark out diamonds, reflecting the leaded windows at the front of the cottage. There is a courtyard between the cottage and the start of the garden, so it is perfectly laid out when looked down upon from the upstairs windows. 

There are stepover apple trees, rods of steel through oak posts, all characteristic of her style of design. I borrow the huge Bramley apple tree from next door, its branches hang over the pumpkin patch. In true cottage garden style, I stud the beech hedge with plum trees. Making the most of the space.

Two of my diamonds in the kitchen garden are full to the edges with David Austin roses, because I want to see them every day. One is filled with Solomon’s seal, and hellebores, because it is the only patch of shade I have anywhere at all. 

To even things up, one of the beds in the flower field is the most prolific asparagus patch I have ever known. It is just starting to get going. A drop of rain and it you can almost see it growing.

Have you got enough seed? I have had a lot of emails in the last week or so. I have opened the shop for tonight for some emergency ration packs of vegetable seed, and the odd sweet pea that is left.  (Please note, my seed is now exclusively available to members of Gather—find out more this way.)

If you have just planted your sweet peas out and they appear to be just sitting there, they do do this incredibly disconcerting thing of sulking. They might not be doing anything above ground, but they are getting their roots down They will suddenly take off when they are ready.

Stay safe and well. 

Breath in. 

Breath out.

G x