This Month's Tips

March, 2010

It's been a long cold winter. Even the start of March has been unseasonably chilly. Fortunately warmer, and wetter Atlantic air looks like it's moving our way. Perfect for early spring sowing!

Also perfect conditions for ripening up purple sprouting broccoli - one of the most delicious vegetables there is. If you didn't grow any for this year, look out for our May Monthly Tips when we'll tell you how. Here it is in all it's glory:

Seeds to Sow Now

Whilst April and May are the biggest sowing months of the year, there're plenty of seeds that should go in right now.

March is warm enough to start sowing (frost) hardy vegetable seeds that can cope with the cold conditions and the occasional frost. These include:

  • Broad beans
  • Mange tout/peas
  • Beetroot
  • Radishes
  • Spring Onions
  • Onion Sets
  • Seed Potatoes (chitted - see below)

Whilst these plants can cope with the cool conditions they'll grow much more quickly if they're a little warmer. The best way to provide this is by covering them with some horticultural fleece. Just lay it out loosely over your plants/seeds and they'll just push it up as they grow. Hold it down with pegs, or even or old milk cartons filled up with water.

March is also an ideal time to sow frost-tender fruiting vegetables that need a long growing season. They'll need to be started off inside, ideally in a propagator, and grown on inside, or in a greenhouse until the frosts are over around the middle of May:

  • Tomatoes
  • Chillies
  • Cucumbers
  • Aubergines

Remember, if you haven't decided what to grow yet, or designed your plot, our 'new and improved' plot designer is there for you to use. It should be a big help. Try it.

How to Sow

While we're talking about what seeds to sow, it's worth mentioning how to sow them.

It's far easier to grow vegetables from seed than people think. The trick is to use the right growing method for the particular type of plant/seed. Not only will this give you better results, it will make things a lot easier as well. Here are our favourite sowing methods.

Root crops=Direct
These all quickly send down a tap root. If it hits anything, like the bottom of a pot, you'll end up with strangely shaped veg. Whilst these can have a comedy value, they are ultimately difficult to peel/use.

Sow these seeds directly into your soil. Make sure you work the soil to a relatively fine 'tilth' for a speedy start. This ensures each seed is sitting snugly in a pocket of soil and water.

Salad leaves, lettuces and Peas = Direct or Gutters

All of these can be sown directly into your soil, and we do sow direct a lot of the time, although sometimes we find it easier to sow in rain gutters before transplanting out into the plot. The advantage of gutters is they warm up quickly (particularly useful earlier in the year), seedlings don't have weeds to compete with and they're easy to manage in terms of watering/slugs etc. Plus you don't have to work your soil quite so much to create that 'tilth'.

Peas work well sown in gutters because mice are particularly good at sniffing them out and eating them if you sow direct into the soil.

Beans and Sweetcorn = Rootrainers

Most of these seeds are frost-tender and need to be started off inside or in a greenhouse. Rootrainers give the roots plenty of space to develop, and are specially shaped with ridges that 'train' the roots to run vertically downwards - avoiding that knotted spiral of roots you often get from conventional pots. Rootrainers also have a hole at the bottom of the cell. Once the roots come out of this into the light they stop growing - called 'air pruning', which encourages extra new roots to be generated from the bean or kernel.

Fruiting Veg= Jiffy 7s
We love these. Jiffy 7s are compressed coir compost pellets that, when put into water, puff up into little net bags full of perfect seed growing compost. Like rootrainers they're great for starting out frost-tender plants indoors or in a greenhouse. We sell the large size so you don't have to bother with 'potting on' in most cases. They also work by 'air pruning' as the roots emerge from the netting they stop growing, and send out new ones from the main seed/stem, ensuring a dense and vigourous set of roots that will eagerly shoot out in all directions as soon as you plant them out in your plot.

We use Jiffy 7s for all our fruiting vegetables that are generally frost-tender and need to be started off inside. That includes, tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, chillies, courgettes and cucumbers.

Herbs=Jiffy 7s
Herbs are often slow to germinate from seeds so we tend to sow these in Jiffy 7s too. This ensures they've got time to do their thing, without getting engulfed by weeds. It also means you can keep them in the warm where they'll germinate faster.

Brassicas = Gutters or Modules
Brassicas are best sown in gutters or modules to start with, before transplanting out. We keep ours in the greenhouse where they benefit from the warmth early in the year, but gutters work well for outdoor sowing from April onwards.

This sowing method also helps protect them from slugs, to which the young succulent seedlings are highly vulnerable.

Crop Rotation the Easy Way

Crop rotation is a good thing, but in its pure form it can be tricky to implement.

If you're not familiar with 'the pure form' here's how it works. Divide your plot into four equally-sized beds. One for potatoes, one for peas/beans, one for brassicas, and one for everything else The following year you 'rotate' them. The potatoes go where the onions/roots were, the peas/beans go where the potatoes were and so on.

The primary reason for rotating crops like this is to avoid diseases that affect one family of veg, and lurk in the soil ready to attack a subsequent crop from the same family.

The problem with this method is it assumes your plot neatly divides up into 4 areas, and that you intend to grow equal quantities of vegetables that fall into these categories.

The way around it is to make sure you rotate the plants that are most disease prone. That's potatoes, which are affected by 'blight', and brassicas which are affected by 'club root'.

My solution is, make sure you leave a 2-3 year gap between growing either potatoes and brassicas in the same spot, and you should be fine.

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