Most gardening years follow the same shape: a burst of enthusiasm in March, everything sown at once in April, a glut of courgettes and beans in August that nobody can eat, and bare ground from October to June.
The useful year looks different. It is organised around February to May, because that is the period when stored food is running low, nothing has grown yet, and fresh food is worth the most. Everything that fills that gap is sown the previous summer, which is the least intuitive thing about vegetable growing and the most important.
The hungry gap is the whole point
February to May is when a household is hungriest, in the sense this app cares about. The stores are down, the previous year's roots are finished or sprouting, and the new season has not produced.
Almost nothing sown in spring is ready before June. The crops that fill the gap are the ones that were sown in July and August and stood through the winter.
Notice that every single one was sown before the previous autumn, except the sprouts. See sprouting seeds, which is the one thing that produces fresh food in days, in winter, with no garden at all.
The four sowing seasons
Thinking in four blocks rather than twelve months makes the year easier to hold.
Late winter, February to March. Under cover: onions from seed, leeks, brassicas for summer, early salad. Chit potatoes. Outdoors, very little, and patience is repaid.
Spring, April to May. The main sowing season. Potatoes, roots, beans, brassicas, squash. The one everybody does.
Midsummer, June to August. The most neglected and the most valuable. Sow everything that will overwinter: purple sprouting broccoli, kale, spring cabbage, leeks planted out, chard, and fast crops in the gaps left by lifted earlies.
Autumn, September to November. Garlic and overwintering onions. Broad beans. Field beans as green manure. Cover the beds. Plant fruit and trees, which establish far better in autumn than in spring.
Month by month
June, July and August are the months that matter most and the months when the garden is already full and the gardener is busy harvesting. That is exactly why the winter crops get forgotten.
Put a reminder in the calendar for the first week of July saying "sow for winter". It is the single most useful entry in a growing year.
Succession
Sowing everything at once produces a glut and then nothing.
- Sow little and often. A short row of salad, carrots or beetroot every two to three weeks beats one long row.
- Aim for a picking period rather than a harvest date.
- Fill gaps immediately. As soon as anything is lifted, something goes in behind it: fast salad, oriental greens, turnips, or green manure if it is late in the year.
- Keep a small nursery area of module-sown plants ready to drop into gaps. This is the single technique that keeps a small garden producing continuously.
- Do not sow the whole packet. Seed keeps for years in a cool dry place and a whole packet of lettuce at once is a compost heap in three weeks.
Soil temperature beats the calendar
The reason two gardens a mile apart get different results from the same date.
Seed germinates on soil temperature, not on the month. Sowing into cold wet soil gives poor germination and rot, and a sowing two weeks later into warmer soil often catches up and overtakes it.
- A cheap soil thermometer removes the guesswork. Broadly, most seed wants 7 degrees or more, and beans, squash and sweetcorn want considerably warmer.
- Warm the soil with cloches, fleece or a sheet of clear plastic for a fortnight before sowing.
- Wait. A late sowing into good conditions beats an early one into bad, nearly always.
- Watch what is happening locally. When the hedgerows leaf and the weeds germinate in earnest, the soil is warm enough.
Where you are matters
The month-by-month table above is a rough middle. Adjust it.
- The north and Scotland: two to four weeks later in spring, and earlier in autumn. Shorter season, so overwintering crops need sowing earlier in summer.
- The south and west: earlier, milder, and often wetter. Blight risk is higher.
- Coastal: milder winters, salt wind, later frosts inland than you would expect.
- Altitude: roughly a week later per hundred metres or so of elevation.
- Your own garden: a walled south-facing plot and an exposed north-facing one behave like different counties.
Keep a notebook. Sowing date, variety, what happened. After two seasons you will have a plan for your actual garden that beats any published table, and this is the same argument as the weather notebook. See reading the weather.
The plan on one page
If you do nothing else with this page, do these.
- Sow for winter in July. Purple sprouting broccoli, kale, spring cabbage, chard. It is the highest-value hour in the growing year.
- Plant garlic and overwintering onions in October. No effort, no attention, and they are ready in the gap.
- Grow potatoes in April. The calories. See potatoes.
- Sow something every fortnight from March to September, even if it is one short row.
- Never leave a bed bare. A crop, a green manure or a mulch. Bare soil loses structure, nutrients and life.
- Keep a notebook and let it correct the plan.