SOWING PARSNIPS AND CARROTS / FEBRUARY 2022 / EMMA'S ALLOTMENT DIARIES

A very good morning everyone and happy Friday. If you're watching this on Friday you may be watching it over the weekend, in which case happy weekend. My name is Emma, these are my allotment diaries. I'd love for you to subscribe to my YouTube channel and I've got other links below, other ways you can follow me too. So then my plot today, I actually couldn't come the last two days because it was absolutely pouring with rain, as is the weather in the UK most of the time, so nothing surprising there. But today I woke up, it's blue skies, it's just flipping gorgeous out there. So it's like I need to get to my plot for a little bit and I need to sow something. I don't know about you but I'm getting absolute withdrawal symptoms from not actually sowing anything. I'm being really good this year and I'm actually waiting to sow my seeds, even at home on the windowsill, I'm waiting because I just know that doing it in a rush is just not good for anyone and everything ends up dying. So I actually came here today to sow parsnips. Now these are just Gladiator F1s, I got them from Wilko's, they're nothing special, they're pretty much the £1.50, you can just pick them up. It says to sow them in February, March, April or May, so I'm taking that as the end of February, it's probably okay. I think they can handle a little bit cold and you harvest them from October, November, December. Now last time I sowed parsnips I harvested them way too early and ended up with really, really tiny immature fruit or vegetables, vegetables I think, and I realised as well that they need to survive a frost, so the frost and the cold weather actually makes them taste sweeter and nicer, so it's good to leave them after the frost and then harvest them. So trying those again this year and I've also got some little carrot seeds, I thought I'd try those too and I'm going to sow these under cloche. What is cloche? Well cloche is basically this stuff, oh please don't be a spider in it! Cloche is this, it looks like your old granny's neck curtains, sorry if you've still got neck curtains, always reminds me of my granny. Right yeah it's like this, it's like this little neck curtain, it lets light through but what it does is it keeps out the cold and the frost and it just warms up the soil a bit and keeps them a little bit warm, it's like basically tucking up your seeds in a nice warm blanket and that's what I'm going to cover the carrots with and we'll just give it a go and just see how they go. I know you can sow carrots under a cloche and I've never done it before so let's try it now. Right let's get sowing, how exciting! Because parsnips need a really long growing season I'm going to choose this bed at the front of my plot because everything else has sort of been allocated something and I know the parsnips are going to sit in there for a while and this bed I haven't yet allocated anything to so I think it's a good bed to stick parsnips in. The soil seems okay, I might just rake over it a little bit and just make sure that it's flat because something's been walking in it so it's not a good start is it? So what we're going to do, this is beyond simple, is we're just going to make a trench with our hand like this then we're going to make a second trench here, easy right? Okay So I'll show you what parsnip seeds look like, oh they're blowing away, they look like that, I'm not sure if you can see that but they look a little bit like flower seeds, they're quite flat and that's what they look like. Sow them quite, but also thickly because we're expecting most of them to die so I just do that back and forth like that with my hand, then what we do is we just close them up like that. The reason why you can see me patting the soil down after I filled in the drills is because I want the seed and the soil to have really good contact, that's how they germinate, they need to actually be touching the soil not just hovering on top of it or balancing on a bit of it, they actually need really good contact so I just really gently, not too much, but I just slightly compact it down a bit to make sure that the soil and the seed are touching basically. That's a really useful tip that I learned actually because when you don't do that that's you know one of the reasons why things don't germinate and that's it for my parsnips, they don't really need covering I don't think, I think they'll do fine, so we'll move on to carrots. Right I'm going to do my carrots in this bed which is basically the old brassica bed which didn't work because it got eaten by slugs and snails so the soil is quite good already and for carrots really what you want is a really grainy soil basically like sand, a lot of people don't add sand to their soil when they grow carrots because if you think about the carrot it wants to grow down quite deep and it wants to spread out and sort of make itself quite thick and long and when you've got rocks and things under the soil or the soil isn't quite thin enough that's when it forks and it sort of splits off and stuff because it just hasn't got enough room so the finer you can kind of make your soil for carrots the better, like I said adding sand is a good idea but just adding lots of organic matter as well is really brilliant because it means the soil breaks up easier, like that, so let's see if I squeeze the soil so it comes apart quite easily so it's quite good, I'm full of knowledge today aren't I, look at me, do you know what that seed pack did not give me nearly enough seeds that I actually wanted so I can only actually do half of one of those rows which is ridiculous so what I'll do is I'll cover it with a cloche now and I'll get some more carrot seeds and I'll just come back and just sow some more under there and that's frustrating because you see when you've got a pack of carrot seeds that they actually have enough to actually sow a decent amount of carrots but I think I've got about five seeds in there which is really disappointing so all right we'll cover it with a cloche anyway and that'll be done and then I can just slip my hand under and sow some more later oh my goodness I need to warm up for a second I took my coat off because I didn't want to get too muddy and I'll just show you my knees, this is what happens when you get an allotment plot guys you get muddy knees, I have to walk all the way home with like muddy knees now and it's absolutely freezing out there today I'm really disappointed that I didn't get enough carrots in that packet because for me when I sow carrots I like to over sow and then thin out because that's just the best way because not all of them are going to germinate and also the seeds are so tiny that you know me I always I always like way over so but that's just the way I like to do it and there was like six seeds I couldn't even fill like half a row even if I spaced them out to where they were supposed to be so that was a bit disappointing but like I said I covered it up now so hopefully that will just help to heat the soil up or whatever it does and I'll bring another packet of carrots down next time and sow some carrots right I'm all wrapped up again now because it's so bloody cold today I'm absolutely shivering even though the sun's out and it's blue skies it's just freezing I'm pretty happy with the plot at the moment I'm pretty happy with how things are going oh it's a foxy fox no bloody sign of him now is there anyway I'm not sure why I ran to him what did I expect him to do run to me and us to embrace at the end of some rom-com or something I don't know anyway I'm pretty happy and what I was going to do is just show you where I was going to plant things this year so obviously that's my polytunnel it's going to be tomatoes and peppers and stuff like that in there anything else I can cram in will be crammed in accordingly and then down here I was thinking turning this into a massive bed and doing potatoes basically just having a massive potato area all kinds of different potatoes also I can sort of do earlies and then main crop and then late crop as well all in that same space and then over here this is my flower bed it will always be my flower bed because I haven't bothered to dig anything up so I've got all my dahlias under there so that's flowers in here I really liked doing sweetcorn last year I know you're not supposed to do the same thing in the same place but I'd always over there now foxes surrounding me it's weird yeah I really want to do sweetcorn in here though because it's such a sunny bed it gets so much sun you can see it's already in sun which is excellent then over here obviously I've got my carrots they're going to go in there and I've got the garlic going which will go on for quite some time I've got room around here for salad crops I was thinking because this is going to be pretty free then I've got the pumpkin arch I've got a little bit of room over there I was thinking of doing some beetroot or something like that over there or maybe even courgettes and just whack them in see what happens this is my onion and garlic bed when they are finished it will be brassica bed because obviously it'll be later in the season then and I can put brussels sprouts and broccoli and stuff in there after this is the broad beans I reckon they're going to need taken out I don't think they're looking very good I might do sunflowers in there again something like that sunflowers and I don't even know what else I'm growing for god's sakes something like that and then in this bed up here I've got my blueberry plant I've got the tulips and when all that disappears what I'll do is I'll mulch over the whole bed and this is going to be an extended autumn winter bed so more brassicas and stuff in there and then this is my obviously strawberries in there and then this bed here I was thinking because I got the parsnips now there I was thinking flowers and any other miscellaneous crops that I feel like throwing in I like that to be my miscellaneous bed because I don't know about you but sometimes when it gets later in the season I'm like oh I really want to whack these seeds in I really want to grow this and I think it's good to have a little bit of room left at your plot so you can just whack stuff in whenever you want to whenever you feel like it or someone gives you a free plant or you know you just feel like oh I want carrots now whack them in um so that is the plan for the plot I think it's looking pretty good though it's a nice greenery going in on in some of the beds now it's looking excellent oh right that's me then I'm off um it's absolutely freezing so I'm gonna go home have a cup of tea edit this try and get it up today um and I will see you again on Monday I suppose see you Monday thank you for watching subscribe to my channel and see you later bye