What I’m Sowing and Growing in February

I love writing these monthly reviews, although January has been a very bleak month on the allotment. Most plots are flooded and it’s been so dull/raining that hardly anything is growing, especially the salad crops. Sowing wise though it’s been a much more exciting month because grow lights are allowing me to squeeze in additional harvests in lots of my beds and especially the polytunnel.

To offset that excitement though is the damage done to some of the lettuce beds by the long periods of damp, cool (not cold) weather. As a result we’ve seen maybe 1/5 of our lettuces – in some beds – lost to stem rot and the prediction of more to come, so I’ve decided to cut my losses. Grow lights to the rescue here as well though, as I’ve been able to have lovely healthy plants ready to replace these beds in time for a March harvest, not far behind where I would have been had I left the original plants in the ground.

Although this article is focused on February 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.

January has seen plenty of planting too, mainly lettuces, calabrese, cauliflowers, spring cabbages and Brussels sprouts, which I grow for leaves in spring.

Before we take a look at our plans for February 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 February’s sowing and growing video!  February is the earliest we recommend sowing seeds without grow lights, but take your time! I have plenty of LED grow light capacity, so I’m a bit more aggressive with my dates but also because I just don’t have space to wait and start everything in March. Please look at the specific guidance that’s included in the embedded database below, or follow this link for details.

Finally here’s my growing progress video

and my sowing video for February!

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 are sowed in January:

If you want to look ahead to future months 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 2021 including all of our perennials

Watch out for the next video showing what I’m sowing in February, here’s a hint, quite a lot!