What I’m Sowing and Growing in December

I love writing these monthly reviews and plans for the following month, so much seems to happen in such a short time and our diet changes as each month clicks by.  The fruit changes the most.  September saw us overwhelmed with tomatoes/peppers/cucumbers and plums and October saw the winter squash arrive and apples and pears reached their peak. In November we delight in the late season apples, which for me are by far the best tasting and we’ve been storing these for winter too. Now we only have apples left and they won’t last much beyond January and it will be May before we are eating home grown fresh fruit again, when the early strawberries arrive. We do buy a little fruit though (mainly apples, pears and cherries) so we don’t deprive ourselves too much.

Although this article is focused on December I also have a summary of everything that I’m sowing for the whole year, if you’re interested please take a look at my month-by-month sowing guide.

November saw the transition to winter veg complete and almost every bed is now planted. Although for us planting never ends. As soon as a bed comes from we are ready with new plants. A case in point is the turnip and Erba Stella bed, which I finished harvesting on the 30th November, I’m planting lettuces for early spring on the 1st of December. As soon as the parsnips are finished in late January, in go the second succession of spring cabbages in February.

We’ve continued to break last years records for every week of the month and we smashed our previous records for November and the year as a whole.  We are on target to harvest about £11,500 in value from our 250m2 of growing area.

We’ve now handed Jennie’s plot over to it’s new owner and clearing the shed and tidying it up has kept us extra busy.  We are all very upbeat about the decision which I talk about in this video

Before we take a look at our plans for November it’s useful to catch up on the existing state of the plots, first up is the kitchen garden:

I also did a tour of my plot:

So finally we get to December’s sowing and growing video!  December is such a grim month, for sowing seeds and I generally don’t recommend it and it’s probably the only month where I follow my own advice. The only thing i’m ‘sowing’ in December are broccoli seeds for sprouting.  I do however have loads of seedlings growing from October and November, which will come ready for planting in December and January and that’s what you get to see in this 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. If you take a copy with my data you will have to delete some of the images, as I have breached the limits of the free version.

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 we sowed in November:

For completeness here’s a view of my sowing database for last year

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 January, here’s a hint, quite a lot!