Crazy February seed sowing!
Ever wondered why you don’t see many gardening blogs around this time of year? You’d be wrong for guessing that we were all in hibernation because the fact of the matter is that February has got to be the busiest month of the year.
Most of you out there are probably thinking its too cold to sow anything and seedlings are not going to survive but again you’d be wrong! Cabbages, broccoli, calabrese and all year round cauliflowers will actually shrivel up and die if left in the greenhouse during a blistering March day, so they are best sown now in nursery beds outdoors as long as you can give them a certain degree of protection. Peas can easily grow on a sunny windowsill or under glass even when sown as far back as the middle of January like I did this year. Over wintering broad beans can be started indoors in January if you forgot to get them in the ground back in September or if you didn’t want to risk loosing them to a harsh winter and most lettuce will germinate at temperatures around 1 degree centigrade.
This year we’ve been lucky in the fact that the weather has been relatively mild compared to past winters. It has meant that even though my greenhouse isn’t lagged with bubble wrap and I have no heating in there, that I’ve been able to store a lot of plants that would normally have been left indoors in a cold room on a cool windowsill. Broad-beans and peas are showing their first signs of life as young shoots peep out from the surface. My leeks are enjoying the fresh cold air and the bursts of sunshine we are having and the spring onions that I’ve sown in modules are already 3inches high. On every windowsill in the house I have trays of seedlings of one kind or another and a variety of home-made propagators (made with clingfilm, lolly sticks and mushroom trays) and the tomato seeds that i put to soak as far back as the middle of January are now coping very well as young seedlings. Although I must admit, you have to be dedicated in your efforts to grow tomato seedlings as early as this as they do take a lot of looking after. Giving them the right amount of light, heat and water is critical and it may mean a gentle spray up to four times a day and constantly moving them around in the available light and also bedding the seedlings into the compost if they start to get leggy.
Last year I missed out on sowing peppers so this year I’ve gone overboard, especially as I learned that small chilli plants can continue to grow indoors over the winter and will bear fruit for many years if looked after in this way. As a volunteer gardener for Incredible Edible Wakefield (and the prospect of a brand new polytunnel being erected on one of our sites and so as not to see such a resource go empty ) I’ve been sowing all the discarded seeds from previous garden clubs that have gone out of date only to find that almost all apart from some carrots and really old peas have actually germinated very well.
Even though I love to grow vegetables, simply because I’d be pretty crazy not to want to, I was happy to see that the GYO magazine actually considered one of my favourite flowers an appetising meal. So not only can I have the most beautiful flowers in my garden, I can actually make a meal out of them too. I’m referring to the Dahlia which I grow every year without fail and which are a must if you want to attract bees, however, I’m not sure if I’d ever dare to eat dahlia tubers unless they were cooked by James Wong himself. I save my tubers over the winter and store them in my outhouse out of the frost, not too damp that they rot but damp enough for them not to dry up altogether and shrivel away, but just in case I did loose them I always have back up seeds. The beauty of growing Dahlia from seed is that you can get new colours that have been created by the bees taking pollen from one coloured dahlia to another. And even though I won’t put my dahlias out until maybe May or June I’ve sown as many as I have room for. Now is also a good time to start sowing sweet peas indoors and back to the vegetables, salad leaf, i.e. rocket, spinach and lettuce, although its a good idea to sow your first batch in tubs or pots under glass so that you can bring them outside when it gets warmer. No rest for the wicked I’m afraid as my next job is pricking out some young lettuce seedlings, which they are pretty lucky that my back has decided to cause me some grief or I might be out there digging instead!
