Sowing season is under way so get your timing right to reap rewards all year round
Sowing outdoors on the veg patch can begin in earnest but you can help young seedlings to thrive by covering them with cloches or fleece to protect them from cold temperatures. And if you’ve heated up the soil for a few weeks in advance of sowing by covering it with black polythene, then that’s even better.
Crops such as parsnip, cabbage and Brussels sprouts are slow-growing so need to be sown now for an autumn harvest but fortunately there are spring, summer and winter-maturing varieties of cabbage and if you sow some of each you should be picking them until November, at which point you can switch to kale, which is ready between December until spring.
If you have limited space for growing vegetables, then working out timings in this way will help you to make the most of what you have and help ensure you have something fresh for the kitchen all year round.
In a tight space you may not want to devote much room to potatoes but raising a few second earlies in old compost sacks will give you a home-grown treat.
You can extend your growing space by attaching planters to walls and growing vertically, and by sowing salads and radishes into spaces between rows of other veg while these are still small.
Onions take up quite a lot of space, but garlic is a smaller plant and can be grown quite successfully in large pots.
Courgettes are another favourite for raising in containers and just a couple of plants will keep you going all summer. Spinach is useful because it can be picked young as a salad leaf or left to grow a little longer for wilting down and if you pick a small variety of carrot, such as one of the “Paris Market” types, then you can even grow crunchy and delicious roots in a window box.
Broad beans that were sown into small pots last month should now have sprouted so if you are growing them in a greenhouse or coldframe, check on them regularly to make sure that they haven’t dried out. Check on other seedlings too, aiming to keep the compost in which they are growing damp but not saturated.