Sofias Country Gardens

I just love growing peas! It may be because my first gardening success was growing peas, and I still remember the pride and joy I felt the first time when my Mum went out in the kitchen garden and picked peas straight from the plant and declared them the best peas she had ever eaten. I also love peas as they are one of the best vegetables to freeze and store for winter, with their sweet summer taste reminding me that nothing lasts forever and a new season will be on its way s

This year again, as always in fact, I'm filling almost half of the garden with peas, beans and potatoes. I love peas and beans, and it brings me great joy to fill the freezer with these staple goods for the long winter when all there is to do is eat and sleep. Potatoes are a different matter. For many years I viewed them as a necessary evil in the garden; something I was expected to grow but didn't really enjoy. But then I found purple potatoes, and discovered the humble art

This year I have a feeling that everything in the kitchen garden has been late. This may or may not be an objective truth, as I do recall complaining about the same thing in previous years. Perhaps a more accurate statement would be that last year the vegetables came on early due to the supernaturally warm weather, and this year things have returned to normal. Throughout June this year, temperatures have ranged between 10°C to 20°C with a lot of rain and wind. Luckily for me

This week I've been busy preparing the kitchen garden for the coming season. Last year I renewed the beds and doubled their size, which meant that the soil is still quite poor. It takes quite a few years to build up new soil and make it fertile and soft. Above is a picture of what the beds looked like after winter. This year I'm also covering the garden paths to help keep the weeds under control. First I cover them with biodegradable fabric, that in theory should disintegrate

To me pruning fruit trees is an art form, and one that I'm not very good at. I enjoy it a lot, but rather as with painting in oil colour I believe that some are intuitively better at it than others. Which is why I spent a lovely day mid March at Rosendals Garden in Stockholm enjoying a one day workshop in pruning fruit trees. The basics are simple enough if the starting point is asking why we prune the tree. When fruit trees are young it is mostly to build a good structure,

Most years I try to grow something new in my vegetable garden, and this year it was the pea Blauwschokker. When I say new, I mean new to me but not necessarily a new variety horticulturally speaking. In fact Blauwschokker (Pisum sativum var.arvense) is a very old heritage variety believed to come from Holland, and still sold by most seed companies due to its continuing popularity. It can be sown outdoors from when the soil has warmed up (in the beginning of May in my cold cli

It is always nice to look back to the beginning and think about all the things that have happened along the way, and so I thought I would write a bit about my gardening journey. It all began when my children were little, and I started thinking about what we eat and how it is produced. As new mothers we are bombarded by so many well-meaning advice that it can be quite overwhelming, and for me it really changed how I think about food and the environment. It seemed that each day

As autumn descends on us I always think of the title of a Louis Bromfield novel: "The rains came". In Finland in autumn the weather usually turns on a sixpence, going from beautiful clear and high blue skies to a total downpour and a dark greyness round the clock. It is as if someone turned off the lights and turned on the tap. The vegetable garden has been slowly disintegrating since the first nights with frost, and by November it is a mess of dead and dying plant material.

Broccoli is one of my favourite vegetables and one that we eat many times a week with the family. I must have a hundred recipes with broccoli stored away, but mostly I love it simply boiled fresh with a knob of butter or in the oven with garlic and fennel. I haven't grown it in the garden before this year, as I always thought it to be a tremendously difficult plant. Turns out it isn't although we had a shaky start. My seedling plants were spindly and weak, and when I planted

One of my favourite things is eating beetroots fresh from the garden. They are wonderful vegetables in that they do keep for weeks at end in storage, but when they are newly picked they have a special crisp and earthy taste that I just love. As with carrots, it is one of the vegetables I alway grow. When it comes to varieties of beets, I find that I can never choose just one so I always get the mixed beetroot selection from Runåbergs Fröer as they have such a great variety of

We have had an unusually sunny and warm September this year, and the kitchen garden has continued to deliver enormous amounts of vegetables. A first for me this year was growing my own leeks. I love leeks and use them a lot in my cooking! They were surprisingly easy to grow, but I had misjudged the space close to the tomatoes so the row closest to them only produced thin little ones. The tomatoes have given me endless joy this year! A plentiful cropper with sweet yellow fruit

Each year I have some staple vegetables that I grow, and a mix of different coloured carrots is one of them. For many years I bought a seed packet called Harlequin that contained different coloured carrots, but then I found Runåbergs fröer that make their own organic mix. The varieties they have in their mix are Maruschka (white), Jaune de Doubs (yellow), Early Nantes (red) and Autumn King (orange). The carrots can be sown any time after the frost has left the ground, but nee

The Ezeta’s Krombek Blauwshokker peas were glorious this year; round and sweet and beautiful to look at. Although I should have planted twice as much, there were enough so that all through July we ate of them to our hearts content. Every few days I would pick a bowl and eat them freshly boiled with a knob of butter or cold in a salad. Then suddenly, in the beginning of August, they were past their due by date. It is fascinating how quickly it goes from prime time to panic har

The best part of growing my own food is the simplicity and variety it offers with different vegetables for dinner each night. If we are in a hurry I might pick some Little Gem squash and simply chop them up for a raw salad with basil. If we have a lot of time I may make a white beetroot salad that needs to be marinated for a few hours. The fact that the kitchen garden is adjacent to the house is probably the key to success, as it becomes so simple to just nip down and see wha

The first rain this summer came on midsummer eve, and I for one was dancing with joy. Before the rain my garden was looking dusty and sad, as my valiant efforts to water it were no match to a good old rain. Then, during the next two weeks it rained properly at least every other day giving the plants a good old root soak. In just three weeks the transformation in the vegetable patch is unbelievable! Suddenly everything has gone "woosh" and yesterday we got to enjoy the first s

The new raised beds in my kitchen garden are now finished and planted up with this years vegetables, surrounded with a sturdy net fence to keep deer and rabbits out. Sadly it seems that this gloriously sunny weather we have had for the last six weeks means that my vegetables are struggling in the drought, and although I spend two hours each evening watering them it hardly seems to matter. Later on, when we have time, the paths between the raised beds will be covered in wood c

Bigger is better, right? At least when it comes to gardens. Personally, I feel that when it comes to the kitchen garden more is definitely more. No minimalism here thank you! Each year I have had a struggle deciding what vegetables I need to have, and which ones I can live without, simply because it has been so small. Now, I get it. Small as a concept is relative to expectations. Although my vegetable garden was small, we never managed to eat everything on offer as I produced

Summer to me is all about the kitchen garden. I have to admit I am a bit obsessed with my small vegetable paradise, and each year I spend a great deal of time preparing the soil, planning my planting scheme and selecting seeds. The picture above is from last year, and below from this year at the same time of month. As you can see I have rotated the vegetables from one place to another according to my plant rotation chart. I spend quite some time weeding in order to give my pl