On a chilly winter’s day, few things beat the comfort and joy of cupping your hands around a steaming bowl of delicious home-made soup, except the satisfaction that the produce came straight from your home vegetable garden.

Why grow your own garden-to-kitchen vegetables?

Besides giving you another reason to spend time in your garden (as if you needed one!), growing vegetables for soup has a range of benefits for your meals, your pocket and your health:

• A budget-friendly way to cook. The more you incorporate seasonal vegetable growing into your home vegetable garden, the less you need to rely on buying cold-season vegetables from the supermarket.
• Fresher than fresh. No grocery-shopped carrots, onions or leeks will be as fresh as those you pull from the earth right on your doorstep moments before cooking.
• What you need, when you need it. The beauty of winter vegetable gardening is that you get more control over what you plant, and can harvest your produce when you need to.

Which are the best winter vegetables to grow?

Which vegetables thrive in our local winter conditions? Here’s our pick:

Carrots

Ask any novice gardener who’s added these nutrient-rich soup staples to their veggie patch, and they’ll tell you they are one of the easiest winter veggies to grow. 

Linked to lower cholesterol levels and better eye health, they’re often paired with celery and onion to make a great base for soup dishes.

Chantenay Karoo is a popular variety, known for its long tapered, deep orange carrots with strong tops, and can be grown from seeds available at your local Stodels garden centre. These carrots have a crisp texture and sweet flavour, bringing dimension to any winter vegetable soup.

Looking to fast-track your growing process? Pick up a carrot seedlings 6-pack instead. 

Top tip: For a continuous supply throughout winter, sow a new row every 3 to 4 weeks.

Onions

From ground to kitchen, a good companion of carrots are onions. Growing onions in alternating rows with carrots keeps carrot fly at bay, and onions work well with carrots to create an aromatic base for winter veggie soups.

The Texas Grano variety is available in vegetable seed packs at your nearest Stodels garden centre, and has a mild, sweet flavour – making it ideal not only for your cold-season stews and soups, but sliced up in salads and sandwiches, too.

Top tip: Onions have very shallow root systems, so they can’t compete with weeds for water. Make sure you keep your onion patch well weeded.

Spinach

Iron-packed and one of the fastest growing winter vegetables that also add bulk to your winter soup, spinach deserves a spot in your winter veggie garden.

The Fordhook Giant variety is available in seed packs at Stodels, and is ideal for sautéing, steaming or adding to winter veggie soups and stews. A rich source of vitamin K, spinach is known to help regulate blood sugar levels and support heart health.

Top tip: Make sure you grow your spinach in well-drained soil rich in organic matter for the best yield.

Leeks

Growing leeks has a few advantages outside of the delicious depth of flavour they bring to your soups and stews. 

For one, they don’t need a huge amount of space, growing upright in a small patch of your garden. They also are ready for harvesting by 10 or 12 weeks, meaning you can sow them in early June and use them in, say, a batch of leek and potato soup by early August.

Grow them from seedlings or sow Carentan leek seeds in your vegetable garden beds for a hardy, fast-growing plant that will reward you with a distinct mild, sweet flavour to accompany your other winter season veggies in soups.

Top tip: Leeks have attractive foliage, making them a great ornamental plant, too.

Start your winter soup garden today

At your local Stodels garden centre, you can browse a range of seedlings and seeds for your home vegetable garden that will take your winter vegetable soups to the next level.
Got questions about companion planting, or the best gardening tools to get the most rewarding harvest? Our in-store experts and Consultants-on-Call service are there for just that. Armed with your vegetable planting list, the right tools and expert advice, you’ll be stirring a pot of extra-satisfying winter veggie soup in no time.