Planning my 2023 garden
Over the past few years, I’ve really got into gardening. I wrote here about why gardening is good for your well-being, and why I love a slow, imperfect approach to growing, and I intend to share much more of my gardening journey on here and my Instagram this year. I get so much pleasure out of sowing seeds or planting bulbs and watching them grow into flowers or food, creating a colourful garden that brings me joy all year round. There might not be much occuring in my garden during these coldest months (other than digging up my old strawberry patch on the one day the ground wasn’t frozen solid or beneath a deluge of water) but I’ve been doing plenty of planning! I’ve been feeling very inspired by the gardens I admired on my trip to Sweden last year - filled with vegetables, dahlias and hollyhocks. All of the photos in this blog post are from that trip, to remind me of my garden goals.
What am I growing?
This is my first full year with a greenhouse, so I’ll be taking full advantage of that and sowing more from seed than in previous years. I’ll mainly be sowing vegetables from seed, and already have all my seed packets from Chiltern Seeds ready and waiting. I’m focusing on growing my favourite vegetables that I love to eat this year: broad beans, runner beans, two types of kale, rainbow chard, tomatoes, squash, pumpkin, leeks and spinach. I also already have onions and garlic in the ground that we planted back in early autumn. Other vegetables I’ll be growing from plug plants, picked up from our local garden centre: beetroot, fennel, courgettes, salad and lettuce, more tomatoes and new strawberries to replace the old ones that we dug up. I’d also like to add a new rosemary and mint to my little herb garden. And we’ll be filling a few buckets with potatoes.
Onto the flowers! As much as I love growing my own food, it’s flowers that really excite me. I’ll only be sowing a few flower seeds in my greenhouse - cosmos and hollyhocks - but will be scattering poppy, nastutium and marigold seeds liberally directly in my planters. I have tulips, ranuculus and anemones already in the ground - I’m hoping the latter two have survived the winter or I’ll have to order a few late plants to fill the gaps. I also have plenty of dahlia tubers stored from last year, as well as new tubers for this summer and a new addition of gladioli bulbs to plant. Add in a couple of bare roots (roses already planted, sidalcea and astilbe arriving in spring) and a few small plants that I have on order (lupins, butterfly ranuculus, hollyhocks and my beloved geraniums) and my flower garden is going to be bursting at the seams this year!
What’s my plan for the next couple of months?
There’s always lots to do in our garden, even in the middle of winter! Our main plan for the next couple of months is to clear the area to the left of the steps in our back garden, ready for our dry-stone-waller to come and create a few new terraces for us in early spring. I’m hoping there’s enough space here to get more vegetables and flowers in the ground. I’ll also start sowing my flower and vegetable seeds soon, and prune some of my plants such as my roses. Other tasks include creating a couple of new planters where we have space (one on the patio for salad, one by the greenhouse for veg and flowers), and tackling the mess of the front garden. The front garden is definitely a big project for the future, but for now we just need to attack the huge nest of brambles and tidy it up.
If you’d like to chat all things gardening, leave me a comment below or message me on Instagram. I’ll be sharing each step of my journey this year, showing you my progress as I go.
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