For our kitchen garden, March is a key month for sowing seeds. This month we’ll be sowing sweet and chilli peppers and tomatoes (at the end of the month) in heated propagators, brassicas, beetroot and peas in an unheated greenhouse and possibly carrots and parsnips in open ground. We sow peas in root trainers and the young plants will be planted out directly from the trainers.

Peas ready for planting out

For almost everything else we will sow in seed trays and prick out the seedlings and grow them on in cells or small pots before planting out, this is to help make sure that when the plants go into open ground they have really strong root systems and can get going quickly. We use a teaspoon to help with pricking out to avoid root disturbance and damage.

Aubergine seedlings

Chilli Peppers

Sowing carrots and parsnips is weather dependant for us. There needs to be some warmth in the soil to get good germination, but there also needs to be moisture, so our sowing tends to be driven by the weather as much as the time of year. A warmish forecast with rain in late March/Early April means that we’ll be sowing these root crops. If you have limited space, carrots will do well in a container. A deep pot (the sort that roses come in is ideal) filled with sieved compost will work perfectly. With no stones the roots should be long and straight all you need to do is keep the compost watered regularly.  The picture below shows one of the re-cycling boxes that was replaced by a wheelie bin that we planted up with carrots.

Re-using a re-cycling tub for carrots

We will also be planting our seed potatoes during March. Both the early and main crop tubers are currently chitting and will be planted out in mid-and late-March respectively. We will also have planted some seed potatoes in pots in a greenhouse by the end of February for an early crop.

Potatoes chitting

We’ll also be doing a little bit of harvesting this month. Most of the over-wintering crops have finished by now, but purple sprouting broccoli is coming to its best now and the first crop of the new season is likely to be rhubarb.  We force a little bit of rhubarb using an old composting bin that has been replaced by much larger pallet-based compost heaps on the allotment, but most is grown openly to give a staggered harvesting season.  Later in the year we’ll write about planting new rhubarb patch.