SEEDS TO SOW IN MARCH 2024 / ALLOTMENT GARDENING FOR BEGINNERS

hey guys welcome back to my YouTube channel my name is Emma and in today's video I'm going to be sharing all of the seeds that I'm going to be sewing for my allotment Garden in the month of March hi my name's Emma and 6 months ago I took on a brand new allotment plot so if you're interested in gardening or growing your own food follow my allotment Diaries and let's start whacking stuff in [Music] together so yes March is finally here which means that we can start sewing more and more seeds not only at home in Greenhouse and on window sills but also directly into our allotment plots as well but should we should we that is the question because even though it is March and spring is kind of on the horizon now like we are within touching distance of spring the nights can still be quite cold we can still get a frost we could even still get snow I think it snowed in April one year so don't get too ahead of yourselves and always remember to still protect your seeds from the cold so anything that I sew directly in my lot plot will more than likely be cled clush is just a material we put over our beds and it will just stop the frost from settling on the top keep it a little bit warmer it also helps to keep all the moisture in so that our seeds are more likely to germinate so it's a great thing to put over your beds I'd recommend going out and getting some CL if you don't have any already and you want to start sewing directly outside there are some benefits to sewing directly so if you're like me I live in a Victorian Terrace I don't have much natural light inside and I only have quite a flimsy small outside Greenhouse which is plastic so it doesn't get very warm in there and I just don't have the room to start as many seeds at home as I want to so sewing directly anything I can sew directly just saves me so much space so much energy and effort as well direct sewing is probably my favorite thing to do but there are a few things I will be starting at home either in seed trays or on my window sill indoors so I kind of have a mix of seeds to show you I've got flowers and vegetables some will be sewn at home in my little Greenhouse or maybe even on my window sill and other things will go directly into my allotment plot the first thing I'm going to be growing and I grow this every single year is my brassas I love brassicas they are they they're great at growing in partial shade so if you've got any areas of your allotment plot or even in your garden that gets a little bit of shade it gets a little bit Shady maybe only gets five or 6 hours of Sun a day throw in some brassers they do not mind the shade they grow really really well so for my brassers some of them I seem to start from seed at home and I kind of pop them on and then I plant them outside but a lot of them I grow from plug plants I don't think it's cheating um and I love all the different varieties that you can get so I love growing those purple cauliflowers they were incredible I didn't find the seeds for those I literally just brought them as plug plants and they did incredibly so plug plants are not cheating guys but there are a couple I'm going to start from seed and that is my green sprouting calab absolutely love this I think it's a type of broccoli it is broccoli it's definitely broccoli um yeah calib I've grown this for like 2 years in a row and it's always done really really well well it's such a beautiful crop it's really delicious um so I'm going to start that indoors also going to start some suroy cabbage as well one of my favorite cabbages super easy to grow from a seed as well brussel sprouts need a really really long growing period so March is definitely the time to start your seeds if you're going to grow them from seed but like I said if you want to buy plug plants wait for them to come into the garden centers pick those up instead my cauliflower I always grow the all year round cauliflower I don't actually have the siege right now but I absolutely love that and that can be started anytime really but I'm going to start mine in March and then this last one I think this is a Braska I think it comes under the brassic families but I could be completely wrong um and it's col rabie this is the purple Vienna one um I've had a lot of success of growing this directly outside in my lot plot so I'm going to sew this directly and see how it goes but K rabie is one of those I think it's a Brasa um if I'm wrong then it's just a plant we'll just call it a plant but I really feel like K rabi is just one of those crops that's really underrated um and not enough people grow it and actually it's not only is this like really delicious to eat you can eat the bulb I think you can also Steam and eat the leaves as well um but it's also so beautiful it comes out such a vibrant purple and it's such an unusual looking crop um but Co rabie is going to go directly into my plot I have already sewn some pnps I always do my pnps in February at the end of February um I've also sewn some spinach and some beetroot as well that went out last week which was the last week of February so I'm going to start with some beetroot this is the golden eye beetroot beetroot has never really worked for me very well it worked in my first year but ever since then I've never really been able to grow it but I keep whacking it in just in case cuz you never know one day it might decide to grow spinach Renegade whack that in is what happens and parsnips and these are the Gladiator F1 and that's the only parsnips I've ever seen really but I really like them and they always work for me so we're going to put them into this bed here right we're just going to thinly thinly thinly thinly thinly if you just say it it will happen thin thin thin thin thin thin thin thin stop it Emma stop it stop it stop it stop [Music] it but if you haven't yet done those you can do them in March just make sure to clh them like I said because we still might get some colder weather and some Frost it can be hard to know what to grow and to get inspired for different things to grow I always find that I tend to grow the same crops every year on rotation and actually that can become quite dull it's nice to find new things to grow new inspiration and one of the ways that I do that is through magazines and that brings me to talk about the readle app and you know that I've gone on about this um for the past year or so I've been using it it's honestly a fantastic source of information so on the readle app you can access over 7,000 magazines there are tons and tons of different categories that you can go through and browse I'm most interested in the gardening category and there are so many gardening magazines on there one of the things I love the most about it is that they are back cataloged so if you've missed an addition or you want to go back to last year a lot of the jobs to do every year are quite similar so you can go back in time find a magazine that you haven't seen from last year and have a browse through and get some inspiration it just means that you'll never miss out on any addition of your favorite magazine you can always go back and have a look at it you can bookmark the articles that most appeal to you so you don't lose them and you don't have to go flicking through all the magazines again they can all just be in one concise place you can have all your favorite articles or bookmarked just to have a look over whenever you need to and I have a fantastic link below that you can click if you want to sign up to readly it will give you 2 months free and of course you can cancel at any time so I am going to sew my my red onions now in the month of March um and the variety I've gone for is Red Baron um which I think would be really delicious apparently it's great in salads um but I also cook a lot of red onion because I just prefer the taste of red onions to be honest so this is what we're going to sew out so I found a great article on the readle app in the Country Living magazine which is written by Sally kard and um it's all about how to sew out your onion sets she sets out some really great advice really easy tips to follow there's some great pictures there too and I'm a big believer in kind of looking at pictures especially in gardening magazines cuz you're looking for all of that inspiration the great thing about the readle app is that you can actually zoom in onto any of the pictures or even the text as well so I see that she has made some rows and then she's planting them in and not too deep as well cuz sets need to be sewn a little bit shallower she says that onions have shallow delicate Roots so it's important to plant them in soil that already has plenty of mulch or compost which is why I've chosen this bed here which has been freshly mulched [Music] recently so now we just have to keep our fingers crossed in Hope and hope that they grow into some lovely onions if you're interested in finding out more about the redley app or giving it a go yourself I have a link below that will give you two months free and of course you can cancel at any time I definitely recommend it if you're looking for inspiration for your garden this uh Springtime or summertime um and also if you're looking for any tips and advice because there is absolutely tons on there good luck onions and a couple of other things that have already gone out into my allotment plot are my carrots I'm going to succession sew these so I've just done two rows of the early Nance which is a one of my favorite carrot varieties just really easy to grow and I've also sewn some peas into a length of guttering which is a bit of a weird thing to do you've might have seen other gardeners do this the idea is that when the roots go down into the guttering it makes it much easier to transplant the entire row of peas into the ground just make sure to um protect them from anything like mice or birds from getting your peas I've just used a bit of netting over the top to protect mine okay another crop that I'm going to start at home in my little Greenhouse at outside oh my giant leaks I absolutely love leaks but I've never managed to grow one I do have a couple growing behind me um they've been growing for over a year now and I don't want to pick them because they haven't got to the like a normal leak size I can't seem to get them to grow bigger than like a big blade of grass like they just won't go any bigger these are the leaks I was just talking about they've been growing for about 2 years and you can see that they're just not getting to like a leak size I mean that's a good size but that's not a leak size these are the the giant winter leaks and I'm going to sew these today in a little sea tray so let's go and do that together so I'm going to sew my leaks into a tray that looks like this with the individual little modules I'm only doing half because I think I'll be able to use half for something else maybe the cosmos actually which we're going a little bit later and we're just going to drop a few seeds into each of these and then hopefully we'll be able to just pull out the ones that aren't strong and then leave them growing so there'll be minimal root disturbance doing it this way that's the theory anyway Theory and reality rarely mixed when it comes to seed sewing so what we'll do is the trick to sewing seeds is to always pour them into your hand and pinch out from there it's very difficult to get it correct from seed packet directly so pour it into your hand and what we're going to do is take a little pinch just to pop a few into each one and the other trick to remember is to always just Pat them down a little bit we need the seeds to have really good contact with the compost you can see that I'm just using a normal multi-purpose compost here I'm not using a very fine seed compost I find that my seeds do quite well in normal multi-purpose compost and I very very rarely purchase specific compost the only time I'll ever um purchase something that's a specific compost is if it has to be acidic so ericaceous let's pop those into the greenhouse Right Flowers it's going to be the month of sewing flowers right Cosmos Cosmos is one of my favorite a lotman flowers not only is it great for pollinators it's great for picking as well and it's just beautiful it's just beautiful I've got three different varieties here cuz I want them all over the plot to be honest I've got the cosmos sensation mixed these are long lasting ideal for borders and cut flowers so I'm assuming that these ones will give me quite long stems I have grown them before I think these are the really tall big classic Cosmos the classic colors where you've got the lighter pink the darker kind of fuchsia pink and then the white as well stunning okay so these are kind of your bug standard Cosmos then I've got the cosmos dwarf sensation mixed so these are just smaller probably with smaller stems so they're not going to be great for picking but these are going to be great around my apple tree I think I want some kind of lower lower planting around there so I think that'd be really nice same colors and then I've also got the pink Mosaic which has got a really lovely kind of like Mosaic print on all of the petals which I think is just beautiful um I did grow one year I grew the double petal ones that have got like even more petals these look like they have sort of got more petals so they are stunning flowers but I will start these in Sea trays at home couple of things I'm going to go grow directly at my lot plot but this is going to be later in March probably towards the last week of March that is my Cula because culas do really well at my plot if I direct directly sew them um so that will be towards the end of March that I will sew these so I'm going to grow these ones these are the porcupine ones which look quite bushy but I do have some of the other culas as well which look more like a flower not that they don't look like a flower they look like a porcupine you know what I mean and of course I'm going to sew my uh corn flowers cornflowers are now a staple at my alotment plot since I grew them for the first time last year absolutely fell in love with them uh these are the classic fantastic so they're blue I think that's the the pretty classic color of a corn flour these will be sewn directly towards the end of March just into my flower bed and of course I'm going to sew my sunflowers um I'm going to start my first batch of sunflowers like I said I like to uh sucession so sunflowers because they kind of grow they bloom they die they're gone um if you succession sew them you can kind of have those ones growing and then you start your new seeds and then those ones start growing and they finish and then they bloom it's just lovely you can just keep them keep them coming so last time together we also sewed our tomatoes so we seed the Roma the croin and the Blue Moon and this is how they're doing you can see we've had really great germination but they are what is called leggy essentially what's happened is that their stems are too long and they're kind of bending all over the place like this so their leaves are started too high up and the reason this happens is because there's not enough natural light for them so they reach up and up and up as high as they can and their stems get really really long and thin and then all the leaves come at the top and they just chle over and die now with any other plant that would be an issue but the reason why I'm not worried about tomatoes is because you can actually replant them and bury them really deep so you can actually plant them down to their first leaves so when I repot these which I will do soon soon I will just pot them really deep down into the pots and so that they have a chance of sort of becoming unley basically and then hopefully as it gets lighter earlier we'll get more light to them and they can grow really strong and healthy so later on in March I will plant out my early potatoes these are the rocket first earlies they've been chitting on my window sill um which just enables them to sprout a little bit and so they will grow better when they're in the ground and they will go out uh towards the end of [Music] March hope you've enjoyed my little video today of seeds that I'm sewing in March for my allotment plot if you have do subscribe to my YouTube channel hope that helps and I will see you in my next video thanks for watching guys bye