Grower’s Corner – winter greens
Kale
This is one of the least grown winter vegetables which is astonishing, because cooked well it is delicious, highly nourishing and high in iron. It has another major advantage, it shrugs off most of the diseases that trouble many brassicas. It will even stand a fair degree of frost. Grow kale on an open site with moisture retentive, fertile soil, with high nitrogen levels, working in manure or compost, it should thrive for you as long as you don’t plant it on compacted soil. As long as you protect the developing crop from cabbage white butterflies, which can be troubling, and often mean that kale needs to be netted, you need not bother yourself overly about your kale crop. Essentially, like all winter brassicas, kale is planted in April and then pretty well forgotten about until December when you begin to harvest it.
Ruby Chard
This is a broad-leaved glowing-stemmed winter crop which is often grown ornamentally as well as for consumption. It can be grown in rows as an allotment crop or increasingly, many people slow it along garden paths in late spring (after the last frost is over) so that they can enjoy the faintly wrinkled leaves which have red, white, pink or bright yellow veins. Chards grow fast and need to be thinned, so if you are growing it in row, make sure you leave plenty of room for each plant.
Spinach
Spinach is relatively easy to grow in cool climates where it won’t bolt and it is packed with nutrients and it can either be sown in spring for a summer crop, or in the autumn for leaves to pick over the winter. Choose your varieties carefully – some are ideal for spring sowing and others for autumn. To make life easier, pick easy-growing varieties that are happy to be sown in either season. The soil where you intend to grow the spinach needs to be well dug and will benefit from the addition of a general purpose granular fertiliser about three weeks before planting.
- For a summer crop, spinach can be sown from early spring to the middle of June and seeds should be sown an inch apart in trenches half an inch deep. Each row should be around a foot apart. For continuous cropping sow a new row every three weeks to a month. Because spinach tends to run to seed, try sowing it between other taller growing crops that will shade it against the summer sun. Alternatively you can give the plants a sunshade of opaque screening along the side exposed to the sun to try and cut back on bolting. When you harvest spinach, try to make sure that you don’t damage the adjacent plants and only cut enough for the meal you are planning – remember how much it cooks down though, if you are steaming or boiling it.
- For leaves to pick through the winter, sow spinach in late summer and early autumn. Make sure the soil is thoroughly cleared from its summer crop.
Kale and Chard photographs by Joi and author’s own, used under a creative commons attribution licence