Starting the gardening year

My year starts in April. Not just the gardening year, my year in general. This is because I work away for the beginning of each year and tend to get back just in time for the spring planting. Because of this, I plan my garden and order in any seeds and plants necessary in December and get stuck into sowing at the end of March. This year it's of more importance than ever because this is the first year (as of the first of April) we're going to try to rely entirely on our home-grown veg, rather than supplementing any gaps from the supermarket. The only concession we're allowing ourselves is tomatoes and mushrooms until the weather warms up.

This year I've been lucky because spring has come late. I've had two weeks to sow seeds on heat and start on sowing seeds in the greenhouse, and this past weekend when we had the spare time to get down to the allotment, the weather had finally warmed up and the soil had started to warm. That means we're able to start digging, weeding and sowing before the weeds run away too badly. This is what we found:


To reiterate, the beds in this allotment are narrow beds roughly 1 metre wide, oriented north-south to maximise the sun. This photo is looking north. The wheat and barley off to the left behind the bike are just starting to come away again (despite being nibbled a bit) and the bed of garlic, just to the right of the garden fork, is coming along strongly. The very right-hand bed should contain broad beans, but they've had limited success. I suspect they've been nibbled in the snow and frost by hungry rabbits and muntjac deer. After a few hours of digging and sowing, we were pleased to have achieved this:

Three and two-half beds dug and some veg set in. The far left beds contain four types of broad beans to supplement the unsuccessful automn-sown bed. The varieties are Sutton Dwarf, Witkiem Manita, Super Aquadulce and Bunyard Exhibition.

The long bed in the middle ground has been sown with two varieties of parsnip: All American and Tender and True, and a mixture of intercropped onions, carrots and radish. We have four types of onions (from memory, Ailsa Craig, Giant Zittau, Blood Red Holland and Rijnsburger 5), three for storing and a red onion, and green-shouldered white carrot and giant red carrot. The carrots and onions have been sown in the same row together to confuse carrot sly when the inevitable thinning occurs. They've been sown quite thickly, to allow for the inevitable losses that will occur when a few sparse green things appear over lots of bare soil. Radish have been sown in with the onion and carrot to germinate quickly, show where they'll come up, and give us a quick crop.

The nearest bed in the foreground is the first early potatoes going in. This year our first earlies are Colleen, a variety I grew last year and was pleased with. We still have about 10kg of last year's potatoes in store although they're starting to sprout now, so I hope that they'll last another month or two until the Colleen are ready to harvest. The rest of the potatoes will go in in a few weeks time.

In addition to the above, at the far end of the allotment, I planted a couple of rows of beetroot, kohl rabi, turnip and radish, and a couple of rows of peas. I'll plant more every fortnight for the next couple of months, to stagger the harvest.