Organic Gardening Magazine

Your complete guide to gardening - naturally!

Sow in summer

Time to rest on your laurels? Not a bit of it, says Helen Penrose; this is the moment to get the seed box out again to ensure that the harvest continues into autumn, winter and beyond.

If you had a productive spring in your garden, the harvest should be coming on stream as you read this, and it’s easy to feel that you’ve done all the hard work and can now sit back and enjoy the rewards. And to some extent, of course, you should; gardening is supposed to be fun.
But the idea that you sow seeds in spring and harvest the resulting crops in late summer and autumn is becoming a dated one. With the increasing availability of a host of new crops from the Mediterranean and the Far East, most of which are ideally suited to summer sowing, we can stretch the season for salad and leaf crops into autumn and beyond. There are also a whole range of other crops which have been around for a while but are only now getting the recognition they deserve: ‘hungry gap’ crops like chard and spinach, and stalwart winter salads like landcress, corn salad and purslane.
Then there’s successional sowing. Most gardeners nowadays want to enjoy the likes of carrots and beetroot small, tender and fresh from the garden, rather than aiming for one main crop of monster roots to put into the cellar (strange how many gardening books assume that we all still have one of those). A sowing now will give you a welcome crop of ‘baby’ roots as the garden begins to wind down in the autumn.
And finally, of course, there are the traditional winter crops: brassicas, leeks and winter roots. The sowing date for some of those is long past, but others can still be sown now – and where you have missed the boat on sowing, there’s always the catch-up option of buying in transplants.

First principles
Timing on most July sowings is fairly flexible, and if you are going on holiday it makes sense to delay most new sowings until you get back. There’s no surer way of ensuring a drought than to sow seeds and leave them to their own devices for a fortnight. The exceptions are final sowings of main season crops like carrots, beetroot and French beans, and those sowings of winter brassicas which, by the book, ought to have gone in already. Many ‘July’ sowings can in fact be made in August, and some can still go in in September. But don’t forget that – warm as it may be right now – the air and soil will be cooling down rapidly by the first week of September. It makes sense to sow in July if you can, and benefit from the eight or so remaining weeks of prime growing weather.

Give some thought to where you sow the crops that you hope will grow on into the winter. All crops will benefit from some form of covering from October onwards. With some it’s essential, and while others may well survive the winter without protection, they won’t provide you with new leaves to harvest through the winter months unless they are covered by a cloche or cold frame. It therefore pays to think about the dimensions of the protection you can offer, and to group your sowings accordingly.

If you have a greenhouse or polytunnel, the possibilities for overwinter cropping are almost unlimited. It’s unlikely that you will have border space to spare at the moment, of course, but this is not a problem. If you are sowing under glass or plastic, it’s better to delay sowings of overwinter crops until August at least, since the heat of a July greenhouse or tunnel is liable to make them bolt in short order. Sow short rows of oriental crops and winter salads outside for now, for baby leaf cropping in September and October, and hold fire with your undercover sowings. September sowings in a greenhouse or polytunnel will rapidly catch up with July sowings made out of doors.

If your summer garden is full to bursting, don’t be tempted to hurry your summer crops out of the veg plot to make space for the next sitting. Many early crops, like garlic and shallots, which the books say will be ready to harvest in July, in fact benefit from an extra few weeks in the ground. Give them the time they need, and make some or all of your summer sowings in trays or modules. If the weather is very hot, or slugs are a major problem in your garden, this is a good idea in any case. Alternatively, create a seed-bed in a small cleared area as a holding bay for your follow-on crops.
July sowings of summer salads, which will be out of the ground by the autumn, can of course be tucked in wherever there is a gap. If you are planting out winter brassicas, which need a lot of space to grow into but won’t actually be using it until later in the year, sow quick-cropping salads between them to get a return on the space in the meantime.

For the full story, see this month's issue, available to buy online!

Copyright information

All content is © Mortons Media Group 2008 • Kitchen Garden magazine | Subscribe to OG | Buy current issue