Get Set! Go!

Early March at the allotment, and if you didn’t sow onion seeds earlier in the year it’s a good time to start them from sets. Onion sets are dormant, immature bulbs. Using these instead of seeds gives you a good head start and is the easiest and quickest way to grow onions.

We usually start our onion sets in twenty cell modular seed trays, planting them out when the soil has had a chance to warm a little more and when the sets have a good root system. This makes it more difficult for birds to pull them out of the ground. Ours were planted on March 4th and there are signs of life already.

There’s more about growing onions from sets on our how to grow onions page.

March is potentially a busy month at the allotment, but the weather can be very unpredictable. This year we have already had just about everything. Frost, heavy downpours of rain, fog and some gusty winds that have been strong enough to bring down a limb or two from the great oak at the bottom of our garden. We’ve even had one day where the sun was so warm that we had our first al fresco lunch - quite a milestone!

There are lots of other things that can be done in March but you do need to be very aware of the weather. We have very heavy clay soil so it doesn’t drain well and stays cold for a long time. We won’t be sowing much outside for a while yet but we have quite a few things started in the conservatory and unheated greenhouse. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the weather forecast to try to decide when it’s safe to start planting out and sowing direct. This varies from year to year and, of course, depends on where you garden too. As gardeners we have to react to the conditions we are given and try to be flexible.

Find out more ideas for things to this month on our things to do on the allotment in March page.

We visited the allotment today to put a rhubarb forcer (when I say rhubarb forcer I actually mean a dustbin with the bottom rusted out!) over some of our crowns and do a bit of weeding. It was invigorating to be out in the fresh air. We also set up a couple of clotches to warm the soil ready to sow some early carrots. We did this for the first time last year and it worked well, we had carrots ready to harvest earlier than we ever had before. Carrots need the soil temperature to be around 12C before they will germinate. Early carrots seed packs often suggest sowing as early as February, which you can do, but without warming the soil and keeping them covered they are very unlikely to germinate and as they don’t transplant well there’s no benefit in sowing them indoors.

There are some more tips on growing carrots here.

Wherever you are and whatever the weather throws at you, have a good spring.