Going up in the world!

Since the Flower Show came to a close (during which we won two gold medals!!) we have all been busy back in the garden.




    Newly tied apple cordons ©Neil Langan



For the last month I’ve been pruning and tying-in the fruit trees in the walled kitchen garden, specifically plums and greengages. They have been pruned and trained in their ‘fan style’. This is very tricky technically, because they fruit on last year’s wood, which means, if you’re not careful you can end up with incredibly long branches with a few fruits right at the end. You tend to take off the long shoots in order to make dormant buds break. Ideally you have the fruits evenly spaced up each fan rib but on short, fruiting laterals. It takes years of practice! We have also pruned and tied in the apple cordons in the middle of the veg garden. All this work is required to be done from ladders so it makes it a long job for each tree. 



We have Victoria, Czar and Kirkes Blue plums and Dennison’s Superb, Old Greengage and Coes Golden Drop greengages. These are all historical varieties which were grown around 1910. These varieties were planted probably ten years ago now by a couple of us and by Simon Tetlow, our Garden Team Leader. They’ve now stretched a good 15 ft wide and reach up to the coping stones at the top of the wall. We are now enjoying the fruits of our labours as we are picking plums and gages for sale in the Garden Shop.

Since finishing the pruning we have been busy weeding in the kitchen garden. The weather has been very kind to the weeds and helping them grow! We’ve been unkind to the weeds in return, and have been hoe-ing them off for the last two weeks or so. We’re still cropping a considerable amount of fruit and veg for the shop including courgettes, cucumbers, cabbage, onions, beans, lettuce, potatoes and raspberries, nectarines, plums and greengages.

Further information about the walled kitchen garden at Tatton Park.

John Hoxworth, Craftsman Gardener

Alliums all over the place!

In the last few days I have been planting out the leeks and onions in the kitchen garden. We’re using Musselborough leeks, a traditional variety and Ailsa Craig onions – a large, bulbing onion which is also a traditional variety.

With the leeks I’ve been topping and tailing them – that’s where you take an inch off the roots and an inch off the top because you plant them using a dibber and you just drop the leek into the hole and water them in. I’ve planted over 50 so far since 8.30am this morning! I’ve got three crops of leeks to go in this year, plus my giant winter leeks so there’ll be plenty for the garden shop and soup-lovers everywhere!

I’ve been looking at reducing the amount of ‘thick necks’ that we have in the onion crop. This can cause ‘neck rot’ when they’re in storage. There are various reasons for this including the soil being too loose and/or too firm. If the soil is too firm the onion has to force its way through the soil, which is why it develops a thick neck. So in order to counteract this they have to be planted at the same height that the bulb is on the stem. However, if you plant it too high, it’s loose in the soil and it bolts. Tricky business! Onion varieties we’ve sown include Bedfordshire Champion, Red Brunswick and Red Baron.

I have over 60 baby pineapple plants now, of which there are probably ten ready for potting up to go in the Pinery. This is the largest number of plants we’ve had since the restoration of the Pinery and we’re now running two beds. One of the beds is a fruiting bed and the other is a succession bed, producing side shoots for potting up, that will eventually go into the fruiting bed. It is the usual practice to take the first two to three side shoots of each plant due to the fact that any produced after the third one usually has much less vigour than the first two or three (I found this out after some experimentation!).

The current fruiting plants are ready to be potted on and are likely to fruit in the next sized pot which will hopefully be in the next eight months.

John Hoxworth

Craftsman Gardener

The diagram above shows the layout of the restored Pinery. At present, the West Compartment is used for fruiting and the East Compartment is used for producing side shoots from plants which have previously fruited.

Pineapple House Re-Stocked

I’m a member of the glasshouse and Kitchen Garden teams. In the last week, I have been working on re-stocking the pineapple house with 40 new pineapple plants, of the variety ‘British Queen’, which are all already fruiting. The Pinery/Vinery was restored in 2007, to re-introduce pineapple production to Tatton, a traditional feature of the kitchen gardens.

Unfortunately, due to the extreme winter we lost all our previous crop in January and February. We’re hoping we’ll be harvesting some fruit from these new plants by the autumn. This is a good time to crop them because, by then, they will hopefully have reached their full size and will taste at their best.

The plants have been potted up and then plunged into the pineapple pits in the Pinery/Vinery. The bed consists of fermenting oak leaves that provide bottom heat to generate root growth. This is a traditional method – others use ‘tanner’s bark’, but this does generate a lot of heat and can be hard to regulate, whereas oak leaves provide a more uniform heat around the pots.

The idea is to produce good pineapples rather than just growing them. This means, we need to pay attention to watering and ventilation, and ‘damping down’ (sprinkling water across the paths, walls, glass and misting over the top of the pineapples themselves). All three things are important and need to be in balance in order to produce a good fruit. This is something I will be checking on a daily basis during my working days.

John Hoxworth, Craftsman Gardener