There is a particular kind of gardening satisfaction in walking out in February, in the rain, and cutting something to eat. It is also the most useful thing a garden does for a household living on stores, because February to May is when the cupboard is dullest and nothing else has grown.
These crops are easy. The only genuinely difficult thing about them is that they are sown in June, when the garden is full and nobody is thinking about winter.
Why these and not others
These are storage crops that store themselves in the ground, which is the elegant part. No processing, no space needed, no rot in a sack. You pick what you need on the day.
Frost improves several of them. Kale, sprouts and parsnips convert starch to sugar in cold weather and genuinely taste better after a frost, which is not gardener's folklore.
The sowing that gets forgotten
The single most valuable hour in a growing year is a June or July afternoon spent sowing for winter.
At that point the beds are full, the earlies are not lifted, and there is a glut of something to deal with. Winter feels a long way off and there is nowhere obvious to put anything.
The way round it:
- Sow into modules or a seedbed, not into their final position. A tray of thirty kale plants takes up almost no space and waits until a bed clears.
- Plant out as space appears, behind the first early potatoes, the broad beans or the garlic.
- Put a reminder in the calendar for the first week of June and the first week of July.
- Sow more than you need and give the spares away. Brassica seedlings are the most useful thing you can hand a neighbour, and it starts the relationship that community and mutual aid is about.
Plant them firmly. Brassicas want to be planted deep and pressed in hard, so they do not rock in winter wind. Water them in, and firm again a fortnight later. A loose brassica in February is one that has rocked its roots free.
Kale
The most reliable winter crop in Britain, and the one to grow if you grow only one.
- Sow May to July, plant out at about 45 centimetres apart.
- Pick from the bottom upwards, a few leaves per plant, leaving the growing point. Cropped that way a plant produces all winter and into spring.
- The more you pick the more it makes.
- Frost improves it.
- Varieties: cavolo nero is tender and less hardy; curly kale is tougher and stands the worst weather; red Russian is somewhere between and very good raw when young.
In spring it produces flowering shoots which are excellent, essentially a second crop, and better than the leaves at that point. Pick them before the flowers open.
Purple sprouting broccoli
The hungry gap crop. It is ready in February, March and April, which is exactly the window nothing else fills.
- Sow May to June. It needs a long season to build a big plant.
- Plant out 60 centimetres apart and stake or earth up the stems, because a mature plant is top-heavy and winter wind rocks it over.
- It takes up ground for the best part of a year, which is the honest cost and is why people leave it out. It is worth it precisely because of when it crops.
- Pick the central spear first, which encourages the side shoots, and then keep picking. A well-grown plant gives weeks of harvest.
- Pick before the flowers open, and keep picking, because once it flowers it stops.
Leeks
The most forgiving winter vegetable there is. They stand in the ground in any weather and are lifted as wanted.
- Sow March to April, thinly, in a seedbed or modules.
- Plant out June to July, when they are pencil thick: make a hole with a dibber about 15 centimetres deep, drop the leek in, and fill the hole with water rather than soil. That is the traditional method and it produces a long blanched white stem.
- No further attention beyond keeping the weeds down.
- Lift from November onwards, as needed, right through to April.
Choose late varieties for winter standing. Early types are for autumn and do not hold as well in hard weather.
Sprouts spring cabbage and chard
Brussels sprouts need a long season and firm planting, and they are worth it for the sheer quantity a good plant produces. Pick from the bottom up, after frost. Stake them, because they blow over.
Spring cabbage is sown in July and August and planted out in autumn, sits small through the winter, and hearts up in March and April. Loose-leaf spring greens can be cut earlier. It is one of the very few things that genuinely produces in April.
Chard and perpetual spinach are the workhorses. Sow in spring for summer and again in July for winter, and they crop for months. Perpetual spinach in particular is close to unkillable and keeps producing leaves through mild winters.
Pigeons
The main problem, and much larger than most people expect.
Wood pigeons will strip a bed of brassicas to the ribs in a day, and they do it in winter when there is nothing else for them and your kale is the only green thing in the parish.
- Net properly. Fine mesh netting, held clear of the leaves on hoops or canes, and pegged or weighted down all round the edges. Netting lying on the plants means the pigeons eat through it.
- Check it after wind.
- Bird scarers work for about a fortnight, and then the pigeons ignore them. Move them, change them, or accept it.
- Cages beat netting if you can build one, and a simple frame of canes and netting round a winter bed is a Saturday morning.
Net before the damage starts, not after. Once pigeons have found a bed they come back daily.
Use a mesh small enough not to trap birds, and check it regularly, because netting that entangles wildlife is both cruel and illegal to leave.
Caterpillars and slugs
Cabbage white caterpillars are the summer problem and they can defoliate a young plant in days.
- Fine mesh insect netting from planting out, which prevents the butterfly laying at all. This is the only reliable answer.
- Otherwise, inspect the undersides of leaves every few days from June to September and squash the eggs and caterpillars.
- They mostly stop by October, so a plant that survives to autumn is usually clear.
Slugs take young transplants overnight, and a plant lost at that stage is a plant lost for the year.
- Plant out larger. A module-grown plant with six leaves survives what a seedling does not.
- Go out after dark with a torch in the first fortnight, which is by far the most effective method.
- Clear hiding places near the bed.
See pests without chemicals in this domain for the full picture.
Clubroot
The one soil problem that seriously limits brassica growing, and it is worth knowing before you have it.
A soil-borne organism that distorts and swells the roots, stunting the plant and eventually killing it. It persists in the soil for many years, and once you have it you have it.
- It is brought in on plants and on soil, so buy or raise clean plants and do not accept brassica seedlings in soil from an unknown garden.
- It is worse in acid, wet, compacted soil. Liming to raise the pH towards 7 helps considerably, and so does improving drainage.
- Rotate. Do not grow brassicas on the same ground repeatedly, which is good practice regardless.
- If you have it: raise plants in large pots of clean compost so they have a strong root system before planting, lime the ground, and choose resistant varieties, several of which now exist.
- Do not compost affected roots.
Rotation generally is worth doing informally rather than rigidly: keep a note of what was where, and avoid putting the same family in the same bed two years running. It reduces soil pests and diseases and it costs nothing but a notebook.