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Winter vegetable gardens can look great, and they are easy to plant. Here’s how.
By Elspeth Thompson~London Telegraph
Vegetable gardens can continue looking good through autumn into winter, as this glorious picture of the walled kitchen garden at Cambo in Scotland shows. Colour is provided not only by the curved bands of flowers and wispy grasses, but also by the gorgeous blue-grey cabbages, deep purply red of curly kale and pagoda-like spires of ‘Revolution’ lettuce deliberately allowed to go to seed. It may be too late to sow such crops for this year, but winter is a good time for sitting down with books and seed catalogues, and planning for the next season – and why not incorporate a few flowers into the mix? Choose the right kinds and, as well as looking beautiful and providing cut flowers for the house, they will attract beneficial insects and improve pollination. Companion planting, mixing flowers and vegetables in a glorious jumble in their front gardens, is a trick the old-time cottage gardeners knew well – and one we could do well to go back to as we look for more space to grow our own.
Other tips to keep the kitchen garden looking good over winter include making your hard structures and supports part of the attraction. Alan and Jackie Gear, co-authors of Organic Gardening: the Whole Story, have painted all the wooden structures in their kitchen garden – compost bins, fruit cages and so on – a restful grey-blue-green (Cuprinol’s Wild Thyme), while Sarah Raven’s permanent bean and sweet pea supports have been painted shocking pink and bright orange over the years.
