It's better to be safe than sorry!
I've been doing lots of sowing indoors to avoid saturated seedlings
If like me, your garden has been saturated over the last few months, you’ll probably have started more seed than usual in containers to plant out later. This not only helps the seedlings establish, but also means you won’t be costing yourself money with seed rotting in wet soil before it can germinate.
Back in January
I sowed a few round-seeded winter hardy peas in root trainers and left them in the cold greenhouse to germinate. Since then they've produced stocky little plants which I’ve been hardening off for the last couple of weeks ready to plant out. As they can technically be sown direct in autumn, these peas will be fine planted out now as long as no pesky pigeons take a liking to them and rip them out of the soil!
I’m also sowing more beetroot seeds in modules as I find them easier to germinate and plant out, rather than them having to take their chances in uncertain weather. The beetroot I sowed around six weeks ago is up and will be planted out once the roots show through the bottom of the cells, meaning they’re growing strongly. Spinach is also another great veg to sow in modules before planting out, meaning that small seedlings won’t be decimated by hungry slugs as soon as they emerge, giving you a better chance of getting a good crop.
There are plenty of other veg I’m getting going this week too, from self-blanching celery, which won’t need all the attention of older varieties and means I won’t have to earth the stalks up or cover them with cardboard tubes, to kales and sprouting broccoli, which are all easy to sow straight into a seed bed or modules in a cold greenhouse. I prefer the latter method as
F1 seed can be expensive for relatively few seeds, meaning that every seedling counts.
I’ve already sown
French marigolds to help fend off greenfly around my tomatoes in the greenhouse, but I’m also now starting off some nicotiana seeds to help guard from whitefly! If you’ve ever grown them, you’ll notice that nicotiana really attract whitefly and are sticky, so I use them to lure the pests away from my plants by placing them outside the doors to the greenhouse as the pests don’t seem to fly past without landing. Then comes the sneaky part; you