Its time to turn your attention to planting Autumn and Winter crops. Before planting, check in first with your soil. Use your best soil for heavy feeders like brassicas or leeks.
Its time to turn your attention to planting Autumn and Winter crops. Before planting, check in first with your soil. Use your best soil for heavy feeders like brassicas or leeks. Where soil is poor, aerate if its compact, then either sow a greencrop to plant amongst in a month, or spread compost over the bed before planting immediately.
Make the most of the warm nights and fast growth to get slow growing winter crops like carrots, parsnips, leeks and cauliflowers underway to ensure there’s plenty of best food for your family, through till spring.
If its roasting hot and dry, my transplanting tips will help give your seedlings a strong start. And if it’s starting to cool off, you’ll want to get your skates on!
What to sow and plant in February
DIRECT SOW
- Greencrops. Make a mixture – choose from phacelia, buckwheat, lupin, red clover, vetch, flax, mustard, daikon, marigold, oats and sow it any gaps after harvest, and/ or as a precursor to May brassica plantings, or to revive tired soil.
- Kohlrabi, parsnip, daikon, radish and carrots. Such good carrots these ones, sown in the heat and harvested in the cold.
- Companion flowers like calendula, chamomile, larkspur, wallflower, cornflower, snapdragons, love in a mist and borage to keep your garden and greenhouse blooming.
- Coriander, salad greens and rocket beneath taller crops or flowers to keep them cooler and shaded so as to slow down bolting.
TRAY SOW
- Start autumn brassicas off now in a little, regular fashion. A few each of cauli, cabbage and broccoli makes a useful mixed, staggered harvest. Broccoli are ready first (apart from sprouting broccoli and Romanesco), then cabbage then cauli.
- Tray sow silverbeet, perpetual beet, chard, parsley, spring onion, red onion or celery.
- Wallflower, dahlia, chamomile, dianthus, larkspur, echinops, hollyhock, anise hyssop – flowers for winter and spring!
DIRECT OR TRAY SOW
- Basil. Little and often sowings of basil are super useful. Basil is at its best when fresh and young – such a beautiful summer herb. Let the old plants flower for the bees, and save the seed to eat or grow next summer.
- Dwarf beans into warm soil. Another row sown now will take you through autumn.
- Beetroot and saladings can be either tray sown in shallow plug trays or direct sown along the picking edge.
- Bok choy or kale.
TRANSPLANT
- Autumn brassicas and winter greens can start going in: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, brussel sprouts, kale, silverbeet, perpetual beet, chard, parsley and celery.
- Leeks for spring.
- Spring onions.
- Saladings in the semi shade.
- Zuchinni and cucumber in the greenhouse.
- Companion flowers.
HARVEST
Regular + Odd Jobs
- Let herbs, flowers and leafy greens spire off to seed and fling their seed about for another generation of seedlings. An easy peasy way to provide many of your own seedlings without lifting a finger. Parsley, chard, perpetual spinach, endive, chicory, coriander, rocket, kale, flowers and saladings are all a perfect fit for this self perpetuating cycle.
- Be on the look out for cabbage white caterpillars on brassica seedlings – don’t forget seedlings in trays! Either squash the caterpillars religiously, cover crops with insect net or spray with BT.
- Boost any crops that need it with liquid feed or a biological spray.
- Pause before you yank old crops out. They make handy nurseries for planting seedlings beneath, in hot weather. Seeds and seedlings flourish in this protected environment – no surprises right, it’s how nature does it after all. As the seedlings grow, steadily crunch down the older crop and lay it on the ground as mulch.
- Check in with your soil – essential every month, but especially from now until the autumn rains begin.
- Save seeds from your best peas, beans, salads, flowers and tomatoes. Self fertile plants like these, are easy for the home gardener. Plant families like brassica and curcurbit that cross pollinate aren’t so easy.
Choose the best fruits from the healthiest plants. Your own saved seed grows in strength every year, becoming more disease resistant + better adapted to your garden year on year. Having your own little seed bank is worth its weight in gold, and avoids disappointment when the seed company stops stocking your favourite. - Top up the mulch around your carrots to keep them well covered and avoid bitter green shoulders – it’s the sun that turns them green. Carrots don’t do well in the heat, so as soon as they have sized up – get them up, washed and stored away. Best done in the cool of the morning. Don’t feel sad if they are a bit pale and not so sweet – that’s just summer carrots! Sweet ones come with the cold.
The Greenhouse
Keep the greenhouse healthy and crops productive with these three practises:
1. daily harvests,
2. squashing pests,
3. regular pruning – remove older leaves and laterals on cucumbers, melons and tomatoes, peppers and aubergines.
- Remove crops as they finish by chopping them at ground level, then sprinkle a mixed greencrop on the spot.
- Leave the doors and vents open, day and night, for healthy airflow. Staple bird-net up, to secure the gap or make a simple curtain from shade cloth or birdnet.
- Drape shade-cloth over overhead wires to filter the intense sunlight.