Patience is a virtue

I say the same thing every year but I still hear many stories of people being caught out, and that is don't be in too much of a rush to get things sown and planted. I haven't sown a seed in the ground outdoors before May for many years now, preferring to do all my propagating and potting on in the protection of the house for the tenderest subjects or greenhouse for those of a hardier nature. Parsnips are pre-chitted indoors before being placed in their growing stations, and carrot seeds will be sown direct into bore hole mixes but with the added protection of a mini-cloche in the shape of a small pane of glass over a plastic tube. Once they're through they're both hardy enough and can survive a few periods of lowish temperature.



The reason I bring all this up is because we have had a very dry Spring with some balmy days but today Winter has stung back with an icy blast. At the garden centres they've been selling bedding plants for several weeks with little signage warning people of the consequences of planting. If at all possible I don't plant a single sausage before June 6th, a date indelibly printed on my mind as one when we had a very hard frost here in the Midlands in the mid-90's. I sometimes risk planting a few bits and bobs by the end of May if time and space are at a premium, but I will always be bouncing about with stress until the magic day has passed, throwing fleece or other protective covers over plants if low temperatures are even hinted at.


Different areas of the country will have different 'last frost dates' of course and this map what I found on t'interweb gives an indication of what you can expect. As you can see I'm in the same predicament as Yorkshire and large swathes of Scottishland (or Upper England as I prefer to call it!) so the annual bleating about their weather problems cuts no mustard with me. As you will also see, my onion-guru friend Helen benefits from being at least a month ahead of me in growing terms down near the south coast.

However, it's not all doom and gloom as the summers are more temperate for us and we don't usually get the extreme heat that the south gets which means crops reach harvest at least a month sooner. A lack of rainfall is also something I don't usually have to worry about, although the water companies are doing their annual bleating exercises and threatening hosepipe bans because as everyone knows gardeners are the most evil, wasteful bastards known to man! Shame on us for expecting them to repair all the fucking broken underground pipes that leach huge percentages of rainfall into the ground before it reaches our taps.