- So you're itching to start sowing seeds
ready for the growing season and deep down,
you know it's a little bit too early
but you ignore that and you go ahead anyway.
I completely understand, I'm the same.
I have to really pull back the reins
and hold myself and try and be patient.
But the truth is, us gardeners, it's hard to be patient.
We want to get closer to those harvests.
So what I did is I thought, okay,
what's the happy medium I can settle with?
And I came up with a list of seven
of the most productive edible crops
that I could sow in February,
so I can really scratch that itch
and get started on my seed sowing mission,
and in this video, I'm sharing that list with you.
Let's kick off this list with Jerusalem artichokes,
which are also called sun chokes
and per square foot, they're easily
one of the most productive crops you can grow.
However, they're totally underrated.
They deserve way more respect and are continuing
to be more and more of a winter staple crop for me.
As a perennial, you plant, harvest,
and then replant them in the exact same space.
We've been growing ours in the same location for 15 years.
Now be warned, they do spread,
but that is a good thing, in my opinion,
unless your space is limited.
Unlike potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes also appear
as and when needed, which is a real blessing.
And again, don't have to worry about frost protection.
They just look after themselves.
Typically I start harvesting Jerusalem artichokes
towards the end of November and continue right through
up until around mid to late February,
where unfortunately, sorry to say it guys,
Jerusalem artichokes are a no-dig's nemesis.
It is impossible to do it no-dig.
You want to just fork through the whole area,
pick as many tubers up, and then what you do
is you create a trench around a foot deep,
30 centimeters deep, you line the bottom 10 centimeters,
four inches, with well broken-down compost or manure,
and then you space tubers one foot, 30 centimeters apart
with the same distance between rows
and then you just rake the soil back over
and there, it's done and dusted.
And my favorite way to enjoy them is after washing them,
I will put them in a roasting tray with a load of oil
and a load of salt and roast it,
and they're just so delicious.
Now for the second crop, and it's probably
something you're not expecting.
It's calendula, also known as pot marigold.
Calendula is grown as a hardy annual,
but it is in fact, a short-lived perennial,
and if you leave your calendula plant in a poly tunnel
or even outside over a warmer winter, it will come back
and give you a really early flourish of flowers.
It's absolutely amazing.
Now, even though it's the flowers that are edible,
the sheer abundance of flowers that calendula produce,
especially if you keep on top of the dead-heading,
means that they absolutely deserve to be in this list,
and now is a great time to make sure
that you can get some seedlings started,
so come April time, April, May,
you can transplant them outside, a month earlier inside,
and enjoy blooms right through summer into autumn.
You can use the petals as a saffron alternative in cooking,
add them into salads or include them
in refreshing summer drinks.
What's your favorite garden snack?
Is it sweet strawberries, sun-warm tomatoes
or the humble pea?
For me, it is definitely peas.
Being able to walk through the garden
grabbing handfuls of pea pods and just eating them
there and there throughout the summer is such a blessing.
Peas are also pretty hardy,
which means starting them undercover
in February is a really good choice to go with.
Now, if you've never grown peas before,
a good starter variety that I've always had
consistently good results with is Ambassador.
If you have a poly tunnel or a greenhouse,
or in here, I'm in a polycrub, one of the best ways
to utilize this space is to grow an early crop of peas.
So even though you can sow peas ready to transplant
later in the year, right now in February,
I would highly recommend sowing peas right now
so you can get an early crop as soon as possible
to really extend your pea season.
Moving on to another legume, are broad beans or fava beans,
and these are really one of the most iconic
late spring, early summer harvests for any kitchen garden.
They're easy to grow, hardy, delicious and super productive,
and you can also eat broad bean shoots.
The only main thing to be aware of when it comes
to sowing broad beans is that they send out a deep taproot.
So you either want to grow in cardboard tubes
or in deep cell module trays or in deep cell pots.
If you start your broad beans now,
you can expect your first broad bean harvest
outside in June, but you could potentially stretch it
and get your first undercover harvest in May.
I'd like to give an honorable mention
to field beans as an alternative to broad beans.
They're basically like a dwarf broad bean.
The pod and the beans are smaller,
but they're incredibly productive and they grow really tall,
and I highly recommend every gardener,
at one stage over their gardening career,
try field beans, both undercover and outside.
We're now moving on to the allium family,
where I'm gonna group two together.
onions, and also shallots.
Now you can start onions from seed.
A lot of people like doing it, but for me
I love starting onions and shallots from sets.
I just love that kind of instant plant.
There's a bit less faff involved and yes,
people will debate about how good the harvest is,
and also whether you are cheating, but also the expense.
But ultimately I think gardening needs to be
down to what you enjoy the most, and for me,
I enjoy planting sets the most.
But whether it's seeds or sets,
February is a time to start your onions and your shallots.
The sixth crop is potatoes.
Yes, it's potato season again,
primarily new potatoes, also known as first earlys.
What I like to do is I like to start these off
in containers, because it's still really cold for potatoes.
They're super tender.
So you always want to make sure that if frost threatens,
you can either move them into a greenhouse
or a poly tunnel or you can move them indoors
if you don't have a structure like this.
I also only like to start with a small handful of buckets,
perhaps four or five that I plant up with new potatoes
around mid-February.
So when I usually plant new potatoes in mid-March,
it means that these sowings and these harvests
come around a month earlier, hopefully in May
into very early June, to start extending that potato season.
Once you've harvested your new potatoes,
place that compost back into the same containers
and then you can transplant your squash or your beans
or even some tomato seedlings in,
just so you can get extra productivity
from the same compost and the same space.
The seventh most productive edible crop
to sow in February is peppers.
These need to be done as soon as possible
and you'll need some kind of heat mat
or heated propagator to aid with germination
'cause they do like to have base heat
or base temperature coming through
to really help kickstart that germination.
Now peppers are unbelievably productive.
My favorite last year was a jalapeno pepper, La Bomba.
It was just utterly laden.
You may be surprised that tomatoes haven't made this list.
After all, they are one of my core crops
and they are incredibly productive,
but the truth is tomatoes grow faster than peppers,
and because of this, I don't like to hold seedlings
in pots for longer than needed.
And chances are, if I started tomatoes now,
I'm not gonna be transplanting them until
at least the start of May, and that means
a lot of potting up, a lot of looking after them,
a lot of trying to stop the seedlings stressing,
and then that leads to poorer crops.
What I like to do is just be a little patient
with tomatoes and start those in mid-March.
I really believe that tomatoes need
as much tender loving care as possible.
Now, if you want a fantastic tomato crop this year
and you want to make sure that you get prepared,
this video right here is gonna be your friend
and ensure that you get a beautiful tomato abundance
this summer and autumn.