SEEDS I'M SOWING IN APRIL 2022 / EMMA'S ALLOTMENT DIARIES / APRIL 2022

Good morning everyone, welcome back to my allotment diaries. If you don't know my name is Emma, these are my allotment diaries and today I'm going to be doing a what I am sowing in April. This worked really well for my March video, a lot of you were interested in what seeds I'm sowing and just to let you know that the seeds that I'm going to be sharing with you are the seeds that I am growing. So I have an allotment plot where I tend to grow vegetables but do have a few flowers there as well and a back garden as well as you can see behind me which is in full spring bloom at the moment and the birds are loving it. Even though it's completely rainy and miserable today the garden is still cheering me up. So these are the seeds that I am sowing, I am based in South London in the UK and so these are the seeds that are going into my plot but if you don't like some of these or if there are other things you want to grow just have a look on Google, that's where I get most of my information of what you can grow at a certain time of year and just sow the things that you want. That's the biggest advice I can give you for your plot, your garden, anything. Sow what you actually like, don't worry about what anyone else is sowing. Very tempting to get carried away with sowing all this chard and things and courgettes and things but if you don't like them don't sow them, it's that simple. It's April, it's spring time, we're going to get going with the sowing now because hopefully by mid-April, end of April, the frost should pretty much be gone though last year it did last till May so I'm keeping everything crossed for this year being a bit of a better year than last year. I'm going to sow my courgettes this year and these are the same seeds that I sowed last year and they are just big green, all green bush they're called and they go really massive so you have to make sure you pick them when they're quite small. I'm going to be starting my courgettes this month. Also going to be starting my fennel, this is pure white large bulbs, never grown it before and so I'm pretty sure that slugs and snails will stay away from this because it's quite an oniony kind of plant. I think it's from the onion family fennel, a beautiful tasting vegetable so I'm going to give fennel a go this year and sow it this month. I'm also going to stick in my cucumbers, this is a lemon cucumber, I do have another cucumber as well, a ridge cucumber which is really good for disease, it's disease resistant and I'm going to be growing this one in a pot outside my courtyard vegetable garden just so I can keep an eye on it. It's quite a warm loving plant, cucumbers, so you have to make sure that you really do have no frost left before these go outside. So cucumbers I'm going to be sowing this year. I'm going to be trying kohlrabi again, I did try this last year and it just did not work for me at all whatsoever because the slugs and snails got to them and I never got to try it but I absolutely love it, it's like a great big purple kind of bulb that grows that you eat, I think it's like a Chinese kind of vegetable used in a lot of Chinese cooking, so I'd really like to try this and I'm going to try it at home and at my allotment plot as well so that I can try and protect it as best I can because slugs and snails love this stuff. Another thing that I'm doing this month is succession sowing. So succession sowing is something that I did struggle with in my first year of my allotment plot but basically what it means is re-sowing your seeds so that you continuously get a harvest. So every three, two or three weeks you just re-sow the same seeds in a different space so that when one harvest is ready the other one's going to be growing ready to pick after it. So the things I'm succession sowing are carrots, oh yes, radishes, turnips and parsnips and these ones are just basically, they're already starting to come up, my carrots, my parsnips, my radishes, my turnips and they're just really good, they're really good for picking, eating, sowing again, picking, eating, sowing again. So I'm going to be succession sowing those. I have already started my pumpkin plants but it's not too late to start your pumpkin plants. If you live in a colder area of the country or a colder country, colder climate, it might be best to start your pumpkins end of April instead of end of March like I did. So pumpkins can go in the ground now, no not in the ground, into pots now to go into the ground later in May or June. I've also potted on things like my tomatoes and my chillies and peppers. Potting on is basically when you put it into a bigger pot and you allow the plant to get bigger, have more room, have more nutrients. So it's a good time to start potting things on if they're getting too big for their pots at the moment. I've also sown some flowers last month. I've actually started my sunflowers which I have every year. I've sown lots of different varieties. So I've got the giant sunflowers, the dwarf sunflowers, the multi-headed sunflowers and the autumn sunflowers which are kind of a reddy colour and my little boy loved doing this. This is a great job to do with kids because kids absolutely love sunflowers. They're so fun, they're so easy to grow so just definitely get your children involved if you're growing sunflowers. I've also started my cosmos flowers. Absolutely love cosmos, I think it's so beautiful, so good for the bees and pollinators. Really good to have an allotment plot because it just attracts all the pollinators in. I've sown three different types. I've got the double-headed cosmos flowers which is just basically got more petals and then I've got the standard cosmos and I've got them in pink and white. Never grown the white ones before but I thought they'd be quite pretty mixed in. Butterflies love them too so very excited for my cosmos plants. Now a lot of you out there might be like me and only have window sills to grow things on so if you're like me and you've only got basically a few windows with a few narrow window sills to grow things on you might be having a couple of problems with your seedlings. One problem might be that they are a little bit leggy which basically means they've got quite a long stem and the leaves start at the top. You don't really want that because they're going to be falling all over the place. The other problem you might have is that they start bending towards the sun if they haven't got much light where you are so there are two little tips that I have learned for dealing with these exact situations. The first one is to continuously turn the pots round so that the plants then have to go the other way towards the sun and this can really just help if you do it two or three times a day it can help the plant to stay straight. The other thing to do is to run your hand lightly over your tray of seedlings to kind of emulate the wind and it makes them feel like they're blowing about in the breeze which confuses them a little bit and can help to straighten them up and stop them from being too leggy. Yeah I hope those couple of tips really help you if you do only have a little bit of space for growing things on you are finding that things are flopping over or maybe just bending and just not looking quite as they're supposed to. I have the same problem as well and this year I'm going to be trying to sow as much as I can before it goes out so I'm not going to do as much direct sowing. This is mainly because I had a massive slug and snail problem at my plot last year and I just couldn't battle them and they just ended up practically eating everything so this year I'm going to try and sow as much as I can in a pot and then when it gets big enough and strong enough I'm going to put it outside and hopefully fingers crossed have more of a chance of protecting it but that can never really be guaranteed at a plot can it? Anyway these are the things that I am sowing this year I hope this video has been interesting to you if it has give me a thumbs up leave me a comment below let me know what you are sowing what you're not sowing so early and I'll be back in my next video don't forget to subscribe to my channel and I'll see you next time thanks for watching bye