As this week's UK seed exchanges begin to get underway, Nick Routledge reports from Oregon on the importance of timing of the seasons and seed:
A friend approached me this week asking for tomato and pepper seed. There was obvious urgency about her: I politely queried the request. She told me she wanted to begin seeding these crops immediately. Further enquiry suggested that 'getting a jump on the season' was a course already firmly decided upon and so, with blessings, the seed was passed along. Lessons will be learned, of that we can be sure.
I haven't even begun thinking about seeding yet. Well, actually, not entirely true. But for this week at least, I have a more pressing concern to hand. I'm in the midst of sorting my seed collection - and a wholly inappropriate use of the personal pronoun that is, because 'my' stash actually owns me. The reason I shower outside, even in the middle of January, is that the toilet-shower cubicle in my (non-) mobile home is stacked wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, with boxes of seed. No matter how much seed I plant or give away, my seed stash only ever seems to grow - through my own seed-saving endeavors, gifts from friends, donations from seed companies, pickups from seed-swaps, and the very occasional purchase of a must-have rarity. It has been a couple of years since I last pulled everything out and took a good look. Agh. This year I marched it all into the greenhouse where it has been sorting me out for several hours each day for the better part of this past week. The sorting continues.
The effort is coalescing my thinking about when I'll begin seeding. I used to pore over planting calendars but nowadays I'm driven mostly by my notes of what happened in the last year or two. I'm far more laid back about the approach than I used to be. Indeed, for those contemplating an early spring seeding flurry, the best advice I have to give is, simply, "Wait."
By resisting the temptation to seed too early, you can do yourself and the plants a big favor. Seasonal conditions and the many associated challenges soften markedly as spring unfolds. Conditions are more favorable. Days are longer and plants will grow much more quickly, in many instances catching up and in some instances actually overtaking plants seeded earlier.
I thought I might follow this article with a follow-up on the hands-on specifics of raising transplants successfully from seed into the spring. In the meantime, I'm curious about timing in the UK. Though the UK and Pacific-Northwestern climates are not, I sense, too dissimilar (we are on a latitudinal par with southern France, I believe). When do you seed your peas? This year, I will be putting up pea transplants before the end of January, as well as direct seeding in my own garden, probably around the traditional Valentine's Day window. In the past, I have only ever gone with direct sowing rather than transplanting of peas - we typically get a 7-10 day sunny spell in February when the ground will dry out enough to work, before the weather closes in again. But the preposterous demands of school gardening schedules - the children go on summer vacation in early June - means I am constantly exploring ways to generate as early a harvest as possible, without the use of greenhouses to transplant into. Bush peas (which mature sooner than their pole-climbing cousins) seeded into pots in January, for transplanting in February, are one of this year's new, earlier-to-harvest wrinkles. Other ideas, anybody?
More articles by Nick Routledge.
