Sowing the seeds of success
AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, DON’T BE IN A RUSH TO PLANT YOUR SEEDS TOO QUICKLY. GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO WAIT
THERE are some lovely words in gardening, and seedbed is one of them. There’s something terribly comforting about the idea of a bed for a seed, and the comfort so implied is frankly necessary in practice.
Get hold of any packet of vegetable or hardy annual seeds and you’ll discover that there are helpful instructions for sowing on the back.
Chances are, with these two groups of plants, that you’ll be advised to commit them to the earth “at any time between March and June”.
But such instructions have a tendency to make novice gardeners follow them to the letter, so when March arrives they will brave wind and weather, committing those poor little dried-up grains of hope to a cold and inhospitable soil. Will they come up? Will they heck.
So hold hard and wait until the weather is favourable rather than relying on the calendar. Growing up in Yorkshire, my mother would tell me as a nipper to “add another month to what they say on the packet”. She wasn’t far off.
The earth takes longer to warm up north of Watford. Spring, they say, travels at walking pace from the bottom of our islands to the top, and while I would not expect you to know how long it would take to walk from Weymouth to Wick, you will get my general drift.
The gardeners of old would test the soil to see if it was warm enough to sow seeds in by dropping their trousers and sitting down on the earth with their bare bottom.
This is not something I could advise. But go out and sniff the air. Does it smell as though spring is – if not sprung – on the way? If it doesn’t, go back indoors and pop your seeds in an airtight container in the fridge where they will happily keep for another few days or weeks.
There are still two or three months of sowing time ahead of us – seeds sown later in milder spells will always overtake those that are committed too early when the weather is cold and wet.
So stay your hand and wait a while.
Spring is almost upon us – but not quite!
Seeds sown later will overtake those sown earlier in a cold spell