What I’m sowing and growing in April

For an overview of everything that I’m sowing for the whole year, please take a look at my month-by-month sowing guide.

March is the most important sowing month, but April is still critical.  It’s the month when I get to re-sow things that failed in March! (kalettes) and the month for all of the frost tender outdoor crops like tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and the like.   My sowing strategy is to try and spread the load over February, March and April, rather than try to do too much early and it works well, but I also want to ensure that I extend the season as much as possible for frost tender crops, so I’m pleased to see all of my cucumbers, summer squash, early tomatoes and beans doing so well.

I’m particularly pleased with the progress of the January sown lettuce, that I planted in February in the polytunnel, they will get their first pick in a few days and will fill the gaps between by winter lettuce coming to an end and my spring outdoor plants being ready.  We have been harvesting radish for a month now and all of the back garden beds are now planted and growing well.  Overall harvests are doing nicely too, about £180 of veg every week now, up from £100 in February.

Before we get to the “sowing and growing in March” video though you might like to check out my latest tour, which shows everything that’s being harvested from the plot in addition to just the new sowings and seedlings.

February allotment tour : all ready for spring

So finally we get to March’s sowing and growing video:

April sowing and growing video

If you’re interested in the databases that I used to manage the allotments I also have a video and associated blog post about them.  The blog post has all of the details on how to get your own copy of the database (with or without my data) to customise as you wish.

I also have a fancy new database for tracking all of my seed packets.

Here’s a complete read-only view of the varieties database with all of my data.

Here’s what I’m planning to sow in April:

Here’s what I sowed in March.

For completeness here’s a view of my sowing database for last year with all the details!

Here’s a complete list of the varieties that I’m planning to sow in 2020

Watch out for the next video showing what I’m sowing in May, here’s a hint, successions!