Grow Your Own with Groves

 With this in mind, 5 years ago Mr Groves decided that it would be nice to go the extra mile and create a working vegetable patch to not only inspire our keen grow your own customers but also to try out all of the new grow your own products that were appearing on the market all of the time. 

Three years ago the area was expanded to include an area for growing cut flowers (so called your own).  We are lucky enough to be able to try out summer flowering bulbs and seed in this field, which we sell in the shop as cut flowers in the summer. 
The vegetables grown are all used in the Citrus Grove Restaurant, the cut flowers sold in our shop and we even grow our own pumpkins to sell at Halloween.

 Our pottage garden is open all year round for you to visit at our Bridport Centre and is located right in the middle of our site, next to our solar dome

Jobs for May

 May has been a really busy month in our vegetable garden. There are loads of things to be doing; here are just a few things that we have been up to

Earth up potatoes If you are growing potatoes in lines, make sure you earth them up.  This involves dragging the soil up over the foliage, creating a ridge and allowing the leaves to grow through again.   This not only stimulates the growth of more spuds but also stops any potatoes near the surface turning green.

Plant out sweetcorn We have used sweet nugget in our potage.  The important thing to remember about swwetcorn is that it is wind pollinated to make sure you plant it in blocks rather than rows.

Sow Seeds Leeks, Beetroot & Carrots can all be sown now as well as salads.  The soil is nice and warm and we have finally had some rain so things should germinate really quickly now.  We have been trying out seeds on tape from Suttons this year.  They make life really easy, especially if you have trouble handling smaller seeds.

To find out more about what we have been up to in our pottage garden visit our facebook page here