If you are beginning to wane with the healthy eating regime, it’s easier to stay on track with a few kale plants easily accessible in winter months in the veg patch.

High in fibre and iron and packed with a wide variety of vitamins, the leafy green cabbage-like vegetable has been hailed as a super food for a few years now.

Buy your seeds now as you will need to sow them between Mar and May for harvesting the following spring.

Try this easy kale pesto for a quick way of incorporating this super food into your meal:

85g pine nuts, toasted,

85g parmesan,

coarsely grated,

three cloves of garlic,

75ml extra-virgin olive oil,

75ml olive oil,

85g kale,

juice of one lemon.

Whizz the kale, pine nuts, parmesan, oils, garlic and lemon juice in a food processor and season to taste.

Stir into hot pasta of your choice and top with extra parmesan and oil to taste.

This makes enough for 10-12 servings so any extra can be put in a container or jar, the surface covered with a little oil and stored for up a week in the fridge or freezer for a month.

Winter prune wisteria

With the foliage fallen from wisteria you’ll find the winter prune is much easier than the summer one as you can see the structure of the plant.

It’s a fairly simple job reducing the shoots that you shortened during last summer back to two or three buds.

This will keep the plant tidy and you will be able to see the flowers, as leaves will not block them.

Cut back ornamental grasses

Some deciduous ornamental grasses, should be cut back now to ground level before growth starts,

these include: deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldtau’ and calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster. Whereas pennisetum orientale and miscanthus should be left until later to protect the crown. Stipa tenuissima can be treated as an evergreen by combing out the loose foliage.