A Year in the Garden - How to grow your own - February

In our new program we are giving tips and advice on how to grow your own fruit and veg at home by showing you what we are doing in our garden. Timing is quite important in gardening and we hope that our epsiodes give you a feel for when you need to sow, plant and harvest in your garden. Our episodes are especially relevant to people who live in the UK and Ireland, because we live in Northern Ireland and the climate here is quite cool and not always that easy for gardening.

The February episode looks at indoor sowings, either because it's still too cold outside or because you want to give your plants an early start. Also, some crops like tomatoes, peppers and aubergines really need to be sown indoors, especially in cooler climates. February and March are great times to sow these crops and keeping them indoors until May ensures that you will have a healthy and early crop.

Preparing your ground is also important and February is a great time for this. The soil is warming up but everything's still slow, so digging a bit of compost or manure into your growing soil is perfect at this time of the year and guarantees a fertile soil for the following season.

Then we're also looking at strawberries and garlic. Normally we would have liked to plant them earlier, but planting them now is still very good and should give us a good enough crop. Strawberries and garlic are a great example of companion planting too, the garlic repels aphids and other pests and apparently gives the strawberries a better taste. We'll have to see! And it saves lots of space and both plants like the same soil conditions, deep and light fertile soil. We urge you to try it!

And finally we are showing you how to make a kiwi compte using unripened local kiwis from the walled garden in Helen's Bay. In the UK and Ireland it's really best to grow kiwis undercover, so in a polytunnel or greenhouse. The plants will be fine outside but the kiwis won't ripen properly, and taking them inside to ripen doesn't make them as sweet as their shop-bought cousins. So the answer is to cook them with sugar, and a compote is great for this. It keeps the kiwis tangy flavour but sweetens the fruit, it's absolutely delicious! And it makes for a great pie filling! But it works well with anything, scones, pancakes, yoghurt, whatever! You really need to try this recipe!