Summer Gardening Hacks: LATE SUMMER SEED SOWING

sowing seeds in late summer is a great hack in the veg garden fresh stowings can replenish bolting crops and flower wise you can get miles ahead with next year's hardy annuals biennials and perennials this q a film recorded for the telegraph live shows you how you might wonder why i'm watering my wheelbarrow but this section is all about sowing seeds and when i'm sowing seeds i like to start off with a good moist compost and then i sow the seeds so i tip the water into a barrel i've got a barrel full which will probably fill about 10 or 15 of my seed cells for me um i just stir it around to make sure it's all nicely moist with this wonderful little tool there trowel with its lost handle um and then i i use the compost a multi-purpose compost i don't use a seed sowing compost the only difference being really is that this has more fertilizer in it and that just keeps them going a little bit longer which i actually like so we did have one question that was sent in that's particularly pertinent for the top of this item and this is from colin and he's asking how easy is it to grow vegetables from seed and i imagine the reason that he sent that in is because he's been seduced by the many adverts of vegetable plug plants and you can buy them lovely little plugs they come straight to your door and they start you off and that is fine but obviously the cost differential is massive and sowing seeds vegetable seeds is really very easy as long as you realize a few key facts they need water to germinate hence moistening the compost and the correct temperature light isn't usually so critical so what i do is i sew them all in cells now i used to way way back i used to sew them directly in the ground but i found the success rates were so minimal compared to sewing them in plug trays that i've totally converted to plug trays and i use these wonderful plug trays which i got from my mum as you can see they're sort of past their prime and i like them because they've got these lovely holy bottoms and now you might think that's strange and doesn't everything full fill through there but it doesn't you see what i do when i start the bottom one off is i have this piece of polystyrene board and i put the tray on top of the board and then i fill it straight from the barrel and i will usually do if i'm saying about 10 trays at once i might have two varieties in one tray i don't always want sort of a 65 plant or whatever it is in a tray of one thing and i do think that's one thing we all do as gardeners is that we sow the whole packet and really how many people want 65 spinach plants for family of two straight away it's much better just to sew a bit of a packet and then save the rest for another sewing and do more and more successional sewing now i suppose the key question is why am i talking about sowing vegetables now seeing as we're at the end of august but i find it's a fantastic time to sew a lot of veg and a lot of hardy annuals and biennials in the flower garden too um so what i think is the bonus of sowing now is that things like um fennel dill coriander spinach those key bolters that if you sew them with great excitement in sort of may june you'll find they will very quickly go up to flower i.e they bolt so you have none of the luscious leaves you just have a load of the flower heads which are actually pretty useless in most cases so i push them in there and i firm them down i like them to be pretty compact that the compost i don't want it to be too loose i want it pretty compact and as you see some of these trays i'm not filling because they're broken on the sides or something like that because they are pretty old now it might be frustrating for you to think where on earth do i buy these and you won't find them anywhere i don't think and i remember when i they were photographed in the telegraph for something i did and charles daddy rang me up you know charles said in the great no dig man he rang me up and said oh bunny where did you get your polystyrene trays mine have all fallen to bits and i want some more and we both searched and we couldn't find any and so he has now actually developed his own version not polystyrene because they're so unenvironmentally friendly now and so he's got his own version of these and i'd hoped to show you one but it didn't quite arrive in time but look online and he's selling those and i think i'll use those when i finally run out of these so i if you see here i've got different trays of different lengths so basically i've cut some of these wider trays into smaller trays why and that's because they fit into these galvanized trays now as i said seeds like moisture to germinate but also as important they like the correct temperature and different seeds like different temperatures to germinate so what i do uh because and also you want your seeds to germinate as fast as possible because the first seed that germinates in a batch will always be the most health healthy the most vigorous because in that little seed they have all the energy they need to germinate and if they're taking six weeks to germinate they use up all that stored energy and then they just can't quite make it so you want them to germinate quickly and it's very important i think to find a list or look at the correct temperature germinate of each thing and then you know you're on the right lines and so i have different areas where i germinate different things now this time of year it's all pretty warm um and so it's not so critical i mean i have brought you my parsley as my french flatly parsley which i love which i sewed on the twen well i sowed it just under two weeks ago now parsley is notoriously slow to germinate it's one of the four difficult ones because again the embryo is not fully developed when when the seed is formed and it will go on developing after you've sown it and it will often take two weeks or more to germinate and you can see these i germinated in my greenhouse which is not heated but i did have this magic little perfect looking heated mat now you can see this is not in its prime stage of use and it's had many years of good hard youth uh use but it plugs into a socket in my greenhouse um and it keeps it warm and with a bit of bottom heat something like parsley will germinate very fast so i have one thing like that i then have a place by my auger in the kitchen and when i'm germinating things like tomatoes and cucumbers cucumbers will germinate in like 24 hours next to the argo at that high temperature tomatoes peppers things like that also want the heat so they'll germinate right by the agar and then i have my greenhouse with my heated mat or without my heated mat and then i have my window sill trays in the kitchen which is warm or i put them in a cooler room if i'm running out of space or i don't need the heat so check what temperatures your seeds like best to germinate first now i mentioned parsley being difficult and i had another question in advance on this and i thought it was interesting it was for margaret and she said she always has a problem with germinating parsnips now parsnips are one of the four slow ones to germinate like parsley and carrots and celery they all have these seeds are not fully mature the embryos are not fully mature so they will take two good weeks now if margaret showing her parsnip seeds in february which some packets tell you to do and it's very cold and not very nice then she will find that they might be in the ground for it could be six weeks and there's still no show so the chance is that they're so vulnerable to pests to birds scratching them up to whatever to mice so it's very very difficult if she sews them straight in the ground but if she chooses an f1 variety and i often use gladiator or countess um then they are f1 so the selected c's they're uniform they're very vigorous they've got the f1 bigger to them they will germinate much quickly much faster sorry and they will grow much faster and so i can be selling those f1 hybrid parsnips right up to really beginning of april and they will still form stonking nice roots by september or october though having said that i always like to wait till after the first frost to lift my parsnips because then the sugars from the leaves go down to the moon and they do taste a lot better though the last few winters we haven't been having the frosts away past christmas so i get a bit greedy and lift them and there we are but so that's the thing so if you're doing celery parsnips carrots or parsley do them in cells do them on a heated mat or in a warm place and as soon as they've come up um you see so these these little um parts i've shown you i will um i'll probably lift them out when they i let a few more germinate i see some are still coming up with the little seed on the top i'll probably wait a week or two and then i'll pop them out and i'll put them either my cold frame or i'll put them outside in a raised bed or some in each probably so i've got different maturities at different times which is obviously a good thing with vegetables not only do we sow too many seeds at the same time so we have all the crops at one time we want to really try and stagger everything as much as we can to keep us eating more over a longer period so we've said about bolting but i'm just going to show you some of the seeds which i'm going to be sewing now now these are the vegetable seeds which i've got from frankie which an italian firm and i i just ha i do use frankie quite a lot um they had although they are from italy they have many many um varieties which are equally good here and for instance there's spinach which is a really good one so this one if i sew it now i could be picking in november in the in the cold um in my polytunnel or i should be picking sort of april march april which will be lovely and those baby leaves are just fantastic also some radishes which i'll be having probably in a well way before christmas some carrots i'll get in it's quite late for carrots but they'll work really well some beet that's that's charred and that is really good at not bolting and that will go on for a good couple of years i'm hoping and i love this purple chicory this is so good over winter it looks surreal when you see these lovely firm bright purple heads with the white ribs in the winter with frost all around it and they're so nice on the coleslaw and this one i love spigorello which many people don't know but and they don't usually tell you to cert now but i often say it now and i'll be picking it probably before christmas and then all through the hungry gap which is that period in sort of march april beginning of may and that's a winner you can use the the tops and the leaves and the shoots every bit of it so that's a great one and this is a it's called sima de wrapper and it's a sprouting turnip top and it's really is specifically used with pasta dish it's an italian pasta dish called oracatiet sorry it's all wrecked yet my italian is really really bad uh almost as bad as my french and um you you'll get the type pasta which has little ears that's a lot easier to say and you mix it with this cimada wrapper and it's a wonderful wonderful dish and i have a lot of pasta dishes here and then of course miscansa lettuce that's a mixed leaves for cutting and out there cotton to come again and they're brilliant and i'll be cutting these way before christmas and in the spring and i've got always with frankie you have a lot of seeds in the pack so they are good value for money and i mentioned the fennel before which is i love fennel i mean people say fennel is really difficult uh to grow but i bird is baby fennel and if you sew it in sort of july august it won't bolt i'll plant it quite closely together when i plant it out from the little modules and i'll be picking i mean last year i sewed it even later and i was picking lovely little bulbs in sort of um february march ne uh the year after which i thought was phenomenal and they were just crispy nice young fennel they weren't the huge big ones like the supermarket ones but they were every bit as tasty um so that's a great one and then obviously for the biennials and the hardy annuals now i did so um some dianthus um so this is the next stage so from these if they're not going into a row in the vegetable bed outside or they're not going into the polly tunnel these dianthus barbarata and their that lovely dark purple one these have actually been potted on because i haven't got room in my beds to plant them out now so i put them in these little pots and i'll keep them in a cold frame or a cold greenhouse or something and then when i've got room and it might be october it might be next march april i'll harden them off and then i'll plant them out and then i'll have lovely color later on next year and that's lovely to get a colour hit other annuals or hardy annuals that you might do things like orlair or it would be really good now and syrinthi there's quite a few varieties that you might want to sow now also i've just sown some seeds from my perennial stocks again they're a sort of a buying or a short leave perennial and i harvested the seeds for my own plants because they're very difficult to get and i've just sewn them now so it's a great time to sow many things to keep your garden really going i think a lot of people tend to think gardening is in the summer but i like to drag it all through the year because although you don't want to go out in the garden in the winter as soon as you're out there and you get into your stride you love it and you don't want to come in and if you can have veg homegrown veg throughout the winter and early spring months i think it really improves your diet no end and everybody says now is that you should be eating 30 different varieties of plant a wheat that can be fruit and veg and i think when you've got your own garden that's dead easy to do more difficult if you're shopping from the supermarket because you cannot buy this range of plants and that's another reason getting back to colin he would never find something like spigorello i'm sure in any supermarket or vegetable thing so you can grow a much wider all by buying plug plants so you can grow a much much wider range of bed vegetables if you choose seed so we've talked about temperature now and then the pest so we do have less pests when we sow in plugs inside or in a cold frame but we do have some and one of the big ones is slugs even up on my bench when i put these all out on the bench if i haven't put something to deter the slugs i will find little plants just snapped off and you'll just see the stalk with no head and they've gone and taken that beautifully succulent top so i use slug pellets and i use something called um ferric phosphate which is the one that's replaced the old methyl delahide tablets which are nice or pellets which are now totally banned but the ferric phosphates fate ones are much more environmentally friendly and if they're indoors in a covered space where birds aren't going to come and eat them i think you are really safe in using these and you can see on my parsley tray you can see some bits of old ferric phosphate tablets now these you can see are slightly fuzzy because these ones were not a particularly good grade of them they they actually become quite fungusy quite quickly um they do vary in how resilient to wet they are but obviously a seed tray is a perfect damp warm environment for fungal growth as well as for slugs um so you know try and find one that is more resistant to fungal growth because then they last longer and the other big pest obviously when you're saying peas or beans is the old mice and these are a problem because you'll sew a whole tray of seeds and you'll come back maybe a day later and you'll see one or two peas chewed up and things on the top and then you'll come back three days later and you'll find the whole lot you know they've discovered it the whole family have come in they've had a sort of massive feast and they've all gone and so when i've sown my peas and beans what i do to actually deter them totally is i have this rather strange heath robinson approach and i have these funny old things they needn't be like this they could just be too high things to support this wonderful dish on the top and you i put this on the top and i put it so the overlap each side and the ends is such that any mice running up could not run underneath that up and over the top and i tell you that fools them all the time they cannot do it they don't like this overlap bit so i do that and then i put a load of trays in there and then once they've gone and their nice size and they've gone out then obviously come out of there so there's the troll i use that for some cool ducks i was given that was their little temporary pond until they went to the big wide world but it's quite useful for that but now it's even more useful for the vegetables so let's get back to the actual sewing business um so here is the tray with the bit of thing on the bottom the polystyrene sheet on the bottom stop it coming out i put it down there and if i'm going to sew something i always write the labels first so i i get out the labels i write down a label for each seed packet the date the person who's selling the seeds because i think that's useful to know if they all fail you want to know who to pick up the phone because it's not always your fault and say look you've got a duff batch of seeds here they haven't germinated and i notice on this pack of seeds which is for my lovely paper it's a poppy nudical champagne bubbles white so it's a lovely hardy annual or perennial white poppy which i'm going to so now an iceland poppy i noticed on the back it says on testing germination of these seeds was below normal to compensate we have substantially increased the packet contents please allow for this one saying well i bet they only found out that when people rang up to complain um so if something doesn't work and you think you've done it all right do do that you know do tell them i think it's wrong and i think generally if you use commercial seeds available to commercial growers they have to be of a really high content or they would go out of business so if you can find a commercial spa that can be really good now these seeds are absolutely tiny so what a lot of people do is they get a match or something and they just lift the end uh wet the end and then they stick it in and and pick up a few on the end and then just push them up so that's one technique some people mix them with sand but i'm going to be more daring i'm going to put them into the palm of my hand and as always although it looks a tiny bit of dust um i don't like the wind here i'm just going to sprinkle them very quickly over the top now because these are so fine i'm not even going to push them in and i will no doubt have more than one seed in each cell quite a few times as i have with the parsley with the parsley i'll just leave like that with these when i pop them on i will actually separate them out so i can see them going in quite nicely and these are the probably the most difficult when they're little and when you get a nice big seed it's much easier you can almost feel them with your fingers how many are going down actually there we are and then i put the label in now when i'm doing a bigger seed that you can just pick one from the finger unless i'm multiple slaying and then i'll just put it in and i'll just lightly press it under push it in with the finger lightly press it down and i find that is the best way to get really good contact between the compost and the seed with those little ones they'll just sit on top so i think that just about wraps it up next time we'll be looking at watering hacks and showing how to save hours of time while producing better results you

Channel: Bunny Guinness

Views: 71,031

Keywords: bunny guinness, Telegraph Live, Late Summer Seed Sowing, what to sow in late summer, sowing veg in late summer, sowing biennials in late summer, sowing hardy annuals in late summer, sowing perennials in late summer, sowing from see, sowing veg all year round, sowing flowers all year roudn, all year round gardening, bunny guinness telegraph columinst, bunny guinness chelsea, garden design, autumn seed sowing, sowing seeds in september, sowing seeds in late august

Id: EJDiTnQPsZU

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021