You Must Sow These Seeds in February

It may be cold, but there is loads you can start sowing already! So dig out your seed box, get your boots on and let’s sowwww!
There’s something for everyone in this week’s episode, whether you’re a leaf-muncher, a herb lover or a comforting carb craver, including a delicious mystery vegetable that you can plant once and harvest forever!

Links mentioned in video:

Seed Starting Masterclass

These Magic Flowers Will Repel Pests and Feed Your Plants

5 Must-Grow Perennial Vegetables

Ginger Masterclass

You Must Sow These Seeds in January

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www.GrowVeg.com/planner

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Can’t wait for winter to be  over and spring to arrive? Well neither can I. Well now’s the perfect time to  make early sowings to get a head   start for when the weather finally does warm up. And in this video I’m going to be  revealing a really rather tasty  

Staple vegetable that you can plant and  then harvest year after year after year. Let’s get started. Come on Rosie. It’s time to wake up the  first salads of the season. Now many salads are very cold tolerant so  it’s worth sowing them this month so that  

You’ll have young plants ready to go outside  once the weather has finally warmed up. The first salad I am going to sow is lettuce. It’s a loose leaf type of lettuce and  the seeds here are really really tiny, so I’m going to just pinch them across like this

And then lightly cover them over. Now there are two things that will dramatically  improve your success with sowing lettuces. The first is to use really fresh seed. The seed doesn’t last that long so it’s  important to make sure it’s viable.

If you have old seed do a little germination  test to make sure it’s still good. I’ll link a video below on how to do that, or buy yourself some fresh seed. Now I’ve sown it here and then  it’s very lightly covering it over

Just a little bit like that  and gently firming it in. Then the second thing we can do once we’ve watered  them is just to cover them to raise the humidity. So let’s give them a bit of a a water first. Now a lot of you have been asking about this.

This is what’s called a pump action sprayer. Just   pump it up and it pressurizes it and then  it gives a lovely fine mist of water which   is really useful because it doesn’t  disturb the seeds you’ve just sown. Right that should do it.

And then just secure it over with  a bit of clear film like that. Where’s the rubber band? There it is. Or you could put it in just a bag  and then put it on the window sill. So this is is going indoors  to germinate in the warm on  

A window sill where the light will  also help those seeds to come along. Now once they’re up they can come  back out here into the greenhouse   or into a cold frame and then grown on a bit. They will go into their own little plug  trays and then they’ll be planted out in  

Early spring about 10 to 12 inches, which  is 25 to 30 cm apart in both directions. These leafy lovlies will form the  bulk of my salad bed and I will   include some radish and salad onions in there too. Now if you’re looking for inspiration for your own  

Salad bed then why not check out the free  trial to our Garden Planner linked below,   where you will find a beautiful ready to use  salad garden in the sample plans collection. And what better way to trumpet in the growing  season than with a sensationally smooth,   almost seductive crop of spinach leaves?

These sorts of greens are impossibly good for you. They make you smile, they make  you glow from the inside out. I would say it’s worth making an early sowing  of spinach so you get an earlier harvest because what happens by about early summer is that  

The plants invariably stretch  out to flower called ‘bolting’ and then your production of  leaves really really slows down. So this time I’m going to sow them  into these plug trays here and I’m   going to sow about three seeds,  two to three seeds per plug.

And they won’t need separating or anything  like that, they’ll just go out as they are. So let’s get these beauties sown. They’re nice light seeds actually so you  can see them against the darker potting mix. And I’m just using like for  most of the things sown today, an all-purpose peat-free potting mix.

And then just of course cover them over again  with a little bit of our sieved through mix. Now these are going to get a nice drink and then  they’re going to go inside to start off as well. They’ll come back out here the moment  they have germinated to grow on

And then they will be planted into the salad  bed out there maybe a month on from that. Now to harvest them it’s a real joy. You just take one or two leaves from each plant at  a time and then leave the other ones to grow on.

And let me tell you, those first leaves  of the season are absolutely sublime. Marvelous marigolds, awesome  alyssum, I love my alliterations. Now there’s a reason I go on about these  beautiful veggie garden flowers time and again and that’s because they’re  so useful in the garden.

These guys really help to attract pollinators  that you’ll need to pollinate your vegetables and they will attract pest predators. Basically, grow these guys and watch  your gardening worries melt away. As you can see from the table here  alyssum alone is incredibly powerful. Get them started now so you’ll have plants in  

Flower to attract predators  before those pests arrive. I have to say it’s barely above freezing  out there but when it’s sunny like this, this is what really fires me up. You can just feel the sap  rising and the joy and ah! Now we’re going to start with our alyssum.

This is a real real trooper because  it flowers all summer kind of on and   off and actually here it flowers  into kind of early winter as well, so this is a really good sort of  value for money kind of flower. Now the seeds are probably the  smallest seeds you can get,

They’re really really tiny  like little specks of dust, so I’m just going to very carefully scatter  them thinly over the surface like that. Probably all I need there actually. And then I’m going to very  very lightly cover them over, just the tiniest amount like that.

You can actually sow these direct  into sort of the of the cracks of   walls and things like that later in spring, but I just want to get  myself a bit of a head start. Next up, marigolds. Now marigolds, these do need a  little bit more warmth to germinate

So these are going to go onto a warm window   sill just in the light to germinate  just to hurry them along basically, but these guys will go onto a heat mat to  get a bit of bottom warmth to get them going. Now let’s get the seeds out here.

They look a little bit I reckon  like kind of tassled wands. If I pick one up you can see what I mean. So these guys get just sown flat  across the surface like this and then just cover them over as before. Now last year’s marigolds  really sung their heart out

And they added a lot of color to the  garden as well which I really really love. So as I said, I’ll give these both a good  water and then they’ll go indoors to germinate. Once they’re up they’ll come outside here.

The marigolds will come out a bit later cause  these do need to be kept completely frost-free. Then I’ll transfer the seedlings into their own   plugs or pots when they’re  really quite young still because the roots won’t be  too developed at that stage

And I find it a lot easier to  gently get them planted that way, rather than having a big root  system that’s quite tricky. And then they’ll go outside as soon as there’s no  frost out there to liven up our summer veg beds. I love how easy these are to grow.

And the other great thing is they  will readily produce their own seeds. Here are some of those marigold  seeds here for example. These ones were produced last summer and  they’ve been sat about outside all winter long, so I haven’t sown them, but next year, or this summer,  

I’m going to collect my own seed  and keep the cycle going like that. Now if you’d like to know more about these  vegetable garden flowers or my other favorites,   do check out our video on that  which I will link to down below.

A few weeks ago I was extolling the virtues  of Jerusalem artichokes or sunchokes and I’ll link to that video below. Well guess what? Now is the time to plant them and I can’t  tell you how excited I am about that. And here are the tubers now.

These guys are super super productive they yield  up to 2 pounds or a kilogram of tubers per plant. And they’re available just when you  really crave them, in the winter and they’ll be yielding their creamy,  smooth, earthy tubers throughout the winter. They’re really magical.

Now if your ground is really frozen solid right  down then obviously wait till it is workable. There’s been a bit of a frost  here but I can still get into   the soil so I’m going to crack on with them. And the first job is just to space them out and  

I’m going to space them about a foot  or 30 cm apart in both directions. You could get away with spacing them more like   1 and 1/2 foot or 45 cm apart if  you have a bigger area to cover. I have to say it looks a bit  like Rosie’s been busy in here…

To plant them I’m just going  to dig a hole about 8 inches   or as close to that as possible  and that’s 20 centimetres deep and pop it in. Now this has got quite a lot of  garden compost added already, but if your soil’s less rich you  could go in with a handful of  

Your own compost into the bottom of  the hole just to help things along. Now Jerusalem artichokes, these are  really really hardy hardy plants. They’re hardy down to about zone three  which is something like lows of minus 40,   so you’re not going to get any problems  from them being in the cold soil.

They’re also remarkably pest free as well and of course they yield their  tubers when they’re needed most. What else can I say about them? Well they’ve got really attractive  flowers later on in the summer and of course they grow nice and tall which makes  

Them a great choice for a kind  of natural shelter or wind break. And they can cope with a little  bit of shade as well so this is   such a hardworking vegetable for your garden. They’re also perennials so some of the tubers   that I harvest in the winter  will be held back to replant

And they’ll go straight back in  here to then give another crop and I can do that again year  after year, after year… So with this all planted I’ll just give it a good  water when it’s really dry just to help it along and other than that it’ll be left to its own  

Devices till it’s time to  harvest from early winter. Come on, hurry up, get snap pea! Sorry, oh dear… uh anyway… Snap peas also known as sugar snaps are a real  joy because there’s no fiddly shelling involved and boy oh boy do they taste amazing.

Now I’m on a bit of a general  health drive at the moment. I’m trying to eat more salads for lunch and  adding some of these guys into your salad, well it just brings a bit of a smile to your face. Snap peas and snow peas are  also known as mangetout,

Which is the French for ‘eat all’ because you  eat the whole thing, peas and pods and all. And they pack down really well  into containers for freezing and there’s no sort of blanching needed, just freeze them as they are,

So this is a really good one to grow and you  don’t need to worry about gluts for that purpose. Now I’m going to start these  off in exactly the same way   as I did for my regular peas back in the autumn and they’re going to be sown  into these toilet roll tubes.

You can see them growing behind  me, my autumn planted ones, but I’ve eased one out here because I wanted to   show you the advantage of these  nice long toilet roll tubes. It encourages the roots to grow down

And if I flip it over you can see the  roots are really kind of raring to go, so these will really take  off when they’re planted out. Now you can sow them directly  outside but starting them off   like this means you can get an earlier start

And they’re also protected from things like slugs and pesky persistent pigeons too. Let’s get on and sow our snap peas anyhow. So I am just going to pop in two seeds  per roll and then cover them over

And ideally we want them about an inch  or 2 cm deep once they’re covered over . Now these will grow on in here until  they’re maybe sort of 6 in or 15 cm tall, by which time it’ll will be nice and  warm outside and they can be planted out. Right, good girl.

Here is some lemongrass that I started from a  piece of stalk earlier last spring, last year and it’s really grown on and it’s hiding indoors at the  moment to keep it out from the chill, but I have to say it’s making a  really rather handsome house plant.

This will come out back here once  it’s warmed up later on in the spring, but I’d like to start some more  of it because I’m really getting   into my Southeast Asian cuisine right now and lemongrass is a real star in that department, as well as ginger of course

And we’ve done a video on that  too which I’ll link to below. Now this time I’m going to start it off from seed so I’m just using the usual  all-purpose potting mix and I’m going to sow over the top. Now sowing early like this is really advantageous.

This will be grown on in the warm indoors and then we’ll get a longer growing season so I’ll have more chance of getting  some stalks to harvest this year before   overwintering the plants to grow  on again for the following year. And then just cover them over very lightly.

Now lemongrass does need light to germinate so you really don’t want to cover them  much, just the very slightest amount. Oh hello Rosie. And then give them a light  water to get them started. I know darling, I’ll be with you in a minute. There we go.

Now like our lettuce seeds we’re  going to get some good results   if we just cover it over with a  bit of clear plastic like that. I need to find another band to secure it. But then this is going to go indoors

And I’ll probably put it on my heat mats, but  if you don’t have one of those don’t worry, just a sunny warm window sill will do the trick. Once the seedlings are up I’m going to  carefully transfer them into their own pots in clusters of about three  to six seedlings per pot.

And then once they fill those smaller pots I can pot them on into larger pots and they will be grown on  in a sunny, warm position. Now it’s important to keep them  comfortably above freezing point, so I would say at least 43  Farenheit or 6 Celsius thereabouts.

And once plants have nicely bulked out I can just break off bits of grass to use in  my cooking and then leave the rest to grow on. I’m especially looking forward  to trying lemongrass tofu and perhaps a deliciously  aromatic Thai tom yum soup. Mmmm, delicious.

Now if you’ve got ideas for using lemongrass I’d  love to know more so drop me a comment below. There’s lots more that can be sown now,   including all of the veggies featured  in last month’s sowing video. That includes sweet and chili peppers,  eggplant or aubergine and carrots

So if you missed that one I invite  you to head on over there next. Happy gardening and I will catch you next time.