Extending the seasons

Domestic goddess rating: 50% Five-a-day: 2/5 Food miles: about 40

On the menu: Toast & juice (breakfast); scrambled eggs (lunch); baked potatoes, ham and salad (supper – we’ve been swimming again)

I sowed my first batch of carrots today – about two weeks earlier than usual. No, of course the ones in the picture aren’t mine – as if! These are grown by those lovely people at the HDRA, or Garden Organic as it’s known these days – they run an organic gardening catalogue which is where I get most of my seed.

Anyway, I digress. The point is, if I get going early this year and sow the right varieties, I can extend the season by up to a month. That means I can be eating carrots a whole month earlier than I otherwise would be, which has to be worth doing in my book.

The right varieties in this case means Early Nantes 2, which is one of the best for really early sowings like this. Actually Early is a bit of a mis-nomer – it doesn’t mean it’s an early crop, just that it matures faster, so this is also a good variety to sow very late in the season when you want your crop to bulk up and mature as quickly as possible before the winter sets in. So it’s good for extending the seasons both ends. It’s not just carrots you can do this with – salad leaves, peas, broad beans, spinach, onions, and a whole host of other things lend themselves to the technique, too.

I’ll also be sowing every two weeks – aka successional sowing. If you sow little and often, you end up with some crops coming through continuously all through the season. You also avoid those irritating gluts when you have more of one type of veg than you can cope with one month – and end up very short the next. It works to iron out the dips you get when a crop fails for whatever reason, too.

Whether I can keep it up is another matter… I’ll keep you posted!