For me, gardening is much like cooking: good results largely depend on timing and planning, with a bit of tweaking along the way.

When spring moves gently into summer the hard work earlier in the year should be starting to pay off. Harvesting begins and it’s often too easy to sit back in satisfaction and enjoyment of early fruit and vegetables. It is important to find a balance between what I see as the 3 types of production: the season long producers such as courgettes, beans and rhubarb; the all at once producers like most fruit, sweet corn and squashes / pumpkins; and the continued sowings like peas, lettuce, beetroot and spring onions. Now is the time to be thinking about re-sowing this last type to keep you in plentiful supply until late autumn.

Most books and seed packets will tell you to sow 3 weeks apart in short rows to ensure a continuous crop.   I find that if I sow at this interval, the earlier sowings, which have probably started in cooler ground are caught up by the later ones and a glut results. Of course it also depends on the weather (dry or wet), the temperature and local conditions. My advice is to wait until the previous sowing has germinated and has produced healthy young plants before considering another sowing. If growth of the first sowing appears slow, wait another week, if it is warm and wet, get the next lot in. Seed is expensive, so if in doubt, hold off. There will always be some courgettes or beans if you find yourself with a gap in pea or lettuce production!

I hate to see home production go to waste so this is where my timing and planning has to be tweaked. Many gardeners plan crop rotations and sowings in meticulous detail but to me this misses the information nature is giving you. This year, after the harsh winter, the ground was particularly cold. I planted my broad beans as usual in February and not one came up. I should have waited two or three weeks and the soil would have been unseasonably warm. Look out for what other plants are telling you – if spring bulbs are late then it’s likely your vegetable plants will be late too. One trick is to plant things like baby carrots in pots, preferably black to absorb plenty of the sun’s heat and get them germinating more quickly. Planting carrots in pots also helps with carrot root fly which flies too low to attack.

This spring has been one of the driest on record. I don’t like to water, partly through laziness and partly as I don’t believe expensive chlorinated water is the right thing for the garden. To me, heavy watering cancels out many of the environmental benefits of home production. Whilst a water butt may help, this year it was emptied long ago. When making continued sowings, dry soil means that germination is slow and plants struggle to establish so again, tweak the sowings if necessary, waiting for some rain if possible and don’t forget to pick your variety carefully as you move through the season.

If you garden biodynamically this will add a further challenge to your timing. I often find that the ‘right day’ is the day I am busy or the heavens open but don’t be enticed into sowing too early and becoming a slave to moon phases if your local conditions are telling you otherwise.

And while you are busy sowing your carrots, lettuce, beetroot, onions and peas you might not be too late to sow some winter harvesting vegetables such as purple sprouting broccoli, Brussels sprouts, winter cabbage and leeks to tied you over that ‘Hungry Gap’ from January to April, but don’t bother after early July as the plants will not grow big enough before the frosts set in.

Words & Photograph by Matthew Bullock

References

A guide to Lunar Gardening – Erika Pepe

The Lunar Organic Calendar

The Vegetable & Herb Expert – Dr D.G. Hessayon