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Category: Garden Highlights | Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2012 9:44 am

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February already! And a belated Happy New Year to all at GardenStew!

It's frosty outside this morning. The temperature was (according to the BBC news) down to about -5 last night, which is pretty cold for Cambridgeshire, England, but there are hints that Spring is on the way. I have snowdrops flowering in several places, and the bush honeysuckle [Lonicera fragrantissima] is in full flower - I can smell it from ten yards away.

The bay tree I chopped dramatically last June is doing well. I'd had a small, nagging doubt whether it would survive the winter at all, but it seems to be fine. It looked like this when I had finished pruning it:


Pruned bay tree ( photo / image / picture from OrangeKing's Garden )

but now looks like this:


Bay 2012 02 ( photo / image / picture from OrangeKing's Garden )

So with Spring on the way I have a few potatoes and some oca chitting on the windowsill.


Chitting oca and potatoes ( photo / image / picture from OrangeKing's Garden )

This is the first time I've grown oca - actually, the first time I've seen any! I plan to pot them up when they have decent shoots, grow them on in the greenhouse, and plant them out under my tomatoes.

The potatoes are a variety called Forty-Fold, which do, as the name suggests, give a good crop; I've grown them before. I do, however, have seed for a number of other plants that are new to me (thanks to the Real Seeds site) including a purple tomato, a Rocoto chilli pepper, a climber called Acocha that produces small green fruit that taste like green peppers (allegedly!), and a yellow-podded mange-tout pea. So I'm really looking forward to this growing season!

But then, who isn't?





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Frank wrote on Sat Feb 04, 2012 11:59 am:

Happy new year also OrangeKing! Your bay tree definitely looks healthy. It would have been awful to lose it. Hopefully the current cold spell won't get any colder like in Eastern Europe.

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