Vege patch to-do list
Robert Guyton’s guide to planting and sowing in harmony with the lunar cycle.
This month’s moon calendar, and edible crops to sow and tend now.
• This month, get sowing and planting!
You can sow dwarf and climbing beans (and peas down south), root crops including beetroot, radishes, carrots, swedes and turnips; leafy greens such as basil, bok choy, lettuces, spring onions and spinach; cucurbits such as pumpkins, cucumbers, rockmelons, scallopini and zucchini; and (apart perhaps from in the very coldest most inland places) it’s finally warm enough to sow sweetcorn and plant watermelon seedlings. You can plant seedlings of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers and chillies (and possibly even sneak in a last few cherry tomatoes from seed) as well as onions (and leeks, broccoli and cauliflower seedlings down south too). Then finally pop in potatoes and yams and get kumaraˉ runners in the ground.
• Planted your tomatoes already?
Then they should be making good progress and will start flowering and even setting unripe fruit over the course of the month. As soon as fruit set begins, start feeding your plants fortnightly (at least) with worm wee, tomato fertiliser or liquid manure. Water regularly too, and remember if you grow tomatoes in pots, especially small pots or hanging baskets, the soil dries more quickly than you expect. Watering once a day might well be necessary if it gets very hot.
• Don’t already have a rhubarb plant?
Then plant one. This easycare perennial crop can be grown all over the country, apart from places that get a really hard frost. Give it deep, rich moist soil – it needs good drainage, so try a raised bed if soil is heavy – and give it space (established plants can reach 1m wide). This is a greedy crop so pile on compost and manure, and don’t harvest in the first year (and only lightly in the second) so your plant can get established.
• Can you grow pumpkins in pots?
Yes, it’s perfectly possible but select the miniature pumpkin varieties, such as ‘Golden Nugget’ (Yates), which don’t take over quite as much as the regular sized sorts. Go for as big a container as possible too, at least 30L, with one plant per pot, keep watering and feeding, and mulch heavily to keep that moisture in the soil (pumpkins are a thirsty crop!).
• Weed, weed and weed some more!
It’s warm and there‘s still lots of spring rain in the soil, so weeds grow like mad this month! But they are easier to pull out now than they will be when they get more established (or worse, flower and set seed!) so remove as many as you can. Remember, every weed competes with the plants you want for light, water and nutrients. Jo McCarroll