You would be forgiven for thinking that January and February are months the garden at Spitalfields City Farm is dormant. Admittedly days can be inclement and therefore visitor numbers are down, but our steady volunteers are made of sterner stuff and continue to turn up week after week to help keep the gardens in tip top condition. Pruning, weeding and preparing for the season ahead are our focus, with many cups of tea to keep the team warm.

We still harvest during winter and indeed have some interesting crops growing. From brussel sprouts and kale to frost hardy salad, there is always something to admire and taste in the garden. We have managed to continue produce our famous mixed salad bags, getting ever more creative with ingredients as sub-zero temperatures are reached.

One January job that we look forward to is the final stage of preparation of our own Spit City Hot Sauce. Made from farm grown chillies, the ‘mash’ (a ferment of chillies, garlic, coriander and spices) was set up in October and ‘burped’ daily, lest it explode! The resulting sauce was in the farm shop for Valentines Day. Eye-wateringly hot, unsurprisingly it sold out in days. Noting this we have already sown a bumper set of seeds for next year’s brew.

Thinking to 2022, plans for growing and garden space are very exciting. We have secured funding to develop a piece of land at the entrance to the farm into a new community garden. We’ll write about this at length separately, but needless to say we will be developing the new garden in consultation with the local community.

In addition, we have also been gifted a donation to help us build a food forest at the farm. This space will feature fruit crops and perennial vegetables along with herbs and edible flowers. We are looking forward to explaining the nature and benefits of edible perennial crops to visitors, including the unusual cardoon, shown below. This is an old English vegetable similar to the globe artichoke but grown for its leaf stem, which when peeled and sauteed tastes like artichoke.

Of course, our monthly update would not be complete without telling you what we are currently sowing. Broad beans have recently been planted alongside an autumn sown batch. We plan to study what difference the planting times make. Salads are always on our minds with various lettuce sown every month. Although sowings are light in the colder months, we always start our chillies, aubergines and peppers in January – they need a long growing season and so are grown in the protective environment of our new propagation booth, which is heated day and night to 10 degrees above the polytunnel temperature.

Finally, Valentines Day is the traditional signal to start the tomatoes and other spring vegetables. Mindful that we have had only the lightest of frosts this winter, we tread with caution lest we suffer a prolonged cold spell in March or April.

Keep warm and come and see us at the farm garden soon.

- Tanya Reynolds, Volunteer Gardener