Be ahead in February with spring almost here

It’s winter and not much is growing. But there is a lot you can do to prepare for when days are longer and the temperatures rise. This video has my advice about getting ahead in February.

Set up a propagation space with some warmth.
Plus we show you grow lights in my conservatory. With germinated radish and peas for shoots.
I give ideas for warmth in a greenhouse.

Sow mid-February and onwards.
See my Calendar https://www.charlesdowding.co.uk/product/charles-dowdings-calendar-of-vegetable-sowing-dates
And Sowing Timeline https://www.charlesdowding.co.uk/education/sowing-timeline
SOW from mid-month onions, spring onions, lettuce, spinach, radish, turnips, broad beans, peas for shoots, cabbage, cauliflower, calabrese, kohlrabi, fennel.
Some for multi-sow and others in seed trays to prick out, multisow link is https://www.charlesdowding.co.uk/education/multisowing

Make sure you’ve got plenty of potting compost and module trays.
My trays in the UK are sold by https://containerwise.co.uk/charles-dowding-propagation-trays/
See this page for stockists around the world
https://www.charlesdowding.co.uk/store/gardening-products

Create your own potting compost https://youtu.be/AcGclgWgtIQ
Pete’s Peat Free is https://petespeatfree.co.uk/products/petes-peat-free-compost-30l
Moorland Gold is https://allgrowsupplies.co.uk

Buying seed, it’s not too late, see my Seeds and Varieties video https://youtu.be/Oir1J_CfU9Q

Sort and chit your potatoes!

Sort root vegetables to save seeds from, such as onions, beetroot, carrots and parsnips. More info https://youtu.be/bHFg6ZEsMCw

Bed prep no dig, if not already done, and this includes raking which I show.
This includes a little hand-weeding.
See this short https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kl3mbaUbFVA
And this long https://youtu.be/6S501eW6nOU

Start new beds from scratch as here https://youtu.be/laBXwOdbOlw

Prune fruit trees, I demonstrate on apple trees.

00:00 Introduction
00:16 Sowing at this time of year – warmth needed for germination
00:54 Using a hot bed for warmth
01:13 Or the warmth of a house
02:08 Using artificial light in a house after germination phase
02:57 Mid-February, good time to start sowing
03:34 Sowing in module trays
04:15 More examples of veg that can be sown mid-Feb, wait to sow warmth-loving plants!
04:34 Potting compost, and making your own
05:02 My recommendations for bought compost
05:17 Trialling composts, including mushroom substrate
05:41 Buying seeds, including potatoes – saving your own
06:43 Seed saving of root vegetables
07:42 No dig bed prep – light raking and weeding
09:21 Getting new ground ready – cardboard or black plastic with compost on top
10:50 Fruit trees, pruning
12:33 Outro

Filmed and edited by Edward Dowding late January 2024, at Homeacres in Somerset UK, zone 8 or temperate climate, mid latitude. This video was Edward’s idea to make. And he had a black eye.

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#february #nodig #growyourownfood #healthyfood #healthylifestyle

[Music] it’s February just at the end of winter so oh can feel like there’s not much to do but actually no there’s a lot of little jobs you can do take your time and it’ll make a big difference to get you ready for the spring so it’s still winter and it’s actually not natural for seeds to germinate and start growing at this time unless we give them some help and there are different ways you can do that like if you have some undercover space outside in your Garden say and it’s not too cold this won’t apply to all of you if it’s not snow on the ground uh it’s probably worth waiting a bit but in February in milder conditions you could sew outside but you will need some extra warmth for the germination phase or the seeds just won’t germinate so if you say had electricity in a greenhouse you could buy one of those electric heat mats and have your tray sitting on that to help them germinate help the seeds to germinate and then what I’m doing is I don’t my Greenhouse is off grid so I don’t have the possibility of electric heat mat in there well I actually make a hot bed but we haven’t done it yet and that in February a good time to start with something like that would be around the 20th actually there’s really no rush at this time of year uh but to get seeds going if you didn’t have something like that in an outdoor space you can do a surprising amount of early propagation in your house for example here I have some trays that we sewed this is part of a trial for comparing different compost that’s why I’ve done some very early sewings because we want to get a handle on which composts are going to work best and these trays were sewn 5 days ago and after sewing we water them completely so the trays are 100% moist the compost is not soggy but really moist and then that means it be inconvenient to try and water in here and make a mess so they’ve just been sitting here actually for 5 days with the plastic on top to keep the moisture in and then that leads to the next phase when you see the seedling leaves appearing but the key Point here is that germination think of that as a phase differ of growing on needs more warmth and that’s why I’m using the warmth of the house at night is much warmer than even a greenhouse in the garden next stage this is using artificial light in the house where there’s not enough actual daylight coming in Windows if you rely on that you get tall leggy thin seedlings long stems and they fall over they’re not strong plants so if you want to carry on with growth after the germination phase which that phase does not need light except for seeds like celery and cerc everything else can germinate in darkness that’s fine but as soon as you see these little leaves of whatever it might be they need some light this is the kind of thing you can do in a house grow lights you can even do this in a seller or something uh totally artificial light but proper grow lights which you can find on the internet and these are radish which were sewn 5 days ago multi-one and peas SE 7 days ago peas for shoots in fact again though we’re tring compost this is early February uh but from mid-February I would say it’s a really good time to sew these ones what you can also sew from mid-February no rush it’s worth waiting if if you sew too early then you get big plants that are ready to go out before it’s very nice outside and sewing from mid Fe generally means you’re going to be planting transplanting from middle of March which is about right with some fleece cover over often and as well as the radish and peas for shoots in particular you could be sewing tets for example really good multi you sew onions salad onions there’s quite a list and what you sew into well these are the trays I designed that for this purpose so they’re really effective there’s enough compost in these quite small cells and you can get little clusters of seedlings that grow very happily together and go in the ground together with their mates works really well you need if you get four radish or four turnips or four Beach root plants in one of these different size trays 15 30 60 according to how much you want to grow those little seedlings can grow to a big enough size and go in the ground together you need one quarter of the compost one quarter of the space to actually do all this propagation it’s quite a factor you can find links to where these trays are for sale in different parts of the world in the video description and then you can do a bit of single swing if you want and that would be into like seed trays that could be from mid-February cabbage calib col Rie fennel many possibilities but what I’m Not sewing yet is things like tomato cucumber the really warmth loving plants that will grow big quite quickly wait until March potting compost we actually need a different compost to fill these trays with because it’s very small volumes and it needs to be high nutrition hold moisture really well it’s not always easy to find good compost if you find a good one you could stock up on it now it stores really well through the year and examples we’ve got here is well actually you can make your own if you’ve got some old enough compost which is dry enough also to SI this is some that we made which has got a bit of worm compost in and even a bit of of wood actually that holds some air in the mix you can buy composts and in the UK at least I can recommend two in particular Pizza PE free compost and Morland gold I found over many years those are so reliable it’s really worth getting a good one might cost a bit more but it’ll repay you and I’ve recently given some to try so there’s one here with uh 10% worm 90% composted wood and there’s one here at Adam produced this morning he’s keen on growing mushrooms and it’s some mushroom sub stra which he then composted for a year it’s basically Woody material composted for a year eaten by worms and we’re just tring that it’s a great way to test your compost actually to sew some seeds in it and see see how it behaves now is a great time to buy seeds if you haven’t already I would look to buy them for the whole year ahead and then you’ve got seeds ready ready for each month as it comes maybe you line them up in a row of dat of sewing however you choose to organize it it really helps to have seeds ready at the right moment uh check out my seeds and varieties video which has a list of good ones I recommend um maybe check out my calendar as well or sewing timeline on the website for for the dates uh buying seed I still need to buy some I need to buy some cucumbers and Brussels sprouts and cett for example and quite a bit in the line of that is seed potatoes so it’s a bit of a misleading name seed potatoes you’re not actually buying seed but you’re buying potatoes now there are potato Fairs around the country you could go to stock up on seed potatoes or use your own you can keep your own seed potatoes and I’ve been putting mine to chit in light so this is a good time to do that as soon as possible so before they develop long shoots in darkness so they’re just short stubby shoots that’s called chits in daylight and why not have a good at this this is seed saving of root vegetables where you need to grow probably at least 10 some people say more but a clump so you got good jeans for cross pollination and these are all examples of vegetables you could save like onions select out your larger ones nicer ones the shape that you like keep the red onions and white onions separate and then past nips I just brought these examples like that’s one I wouldn’t plant to save seeds on so root vegetables are biannual that means that they grow in one year and you to save seed you would transplant the best ones the following year to keep the seed from and they want to grow now I mean it’s uh 1 of February but look at this the SE the temperature in here in the shed is 12° cenr 54 F and as a result these beetro are starting to grow they want to be in their eyes they want to be in the ground but we can still store these said take those off and and these will store for a while yet late winter early spring now dig bed prep if you hadn’t spread compost already it is not too late if you that’s if you have Bol just pop some compost on top and that’s what we did here a couple of months ago before we’ve had quite a bit of frost actually since then and so what you can do now the Frost has broken up any lumps and if you just skim over the surface like this with a rake which also tends to bring up these bits of Woody stuff which I flick into the pathway and you can see how we’re going from a surface that looks a bit sort of pale and not so interesting into something that’s beautifully ready for sewing seeds you could sew carrot seeds into something like this you know this is not too lumpy it’s all good so you just doing that little bit of bed prep and it’s not raking the soil it’s just skimming through the surface compost and one other thing I’m doing in this is picking up bits of plastic there’s always more plastic in this is homemade compost here than I can work out where it came from and it’s also a good chance to knock out any weed so if you see weed Seas germinating just give them a little rake if there’s been any mild weather in Winter you can get weeds like this these are are two really common ones in Winter the grass and you see how much root that’s got and doesn’t really work to hoe even to rake it so pull them out and Dand line actually just starting out growing already has quite a root so I do a bit of winter weeding doesn’t take long but just keep an eye on your beds and keep them Weed Free and then you’re more ready for spring it saves time come the spring now is a great time for getting new ground ready if you got a patch of weeds grass whatever you could start with this method using either cardboard on the grass and weeds with compass on top of the cardboard the cardboard slows down the weed growth and it gets you clean soil if the weeds do grow through like perennial weeds you need to keep removing them in the first year do check out my videos on that the other option which can be easier if you got really strong vigorous weeds is to spread some compost first like we got here ready to do in this area we’re actually progressing up this strip and three years ago oh no two years ago we did the first furthest patch from here where currently there’s leaks and garlic and broad beans coming up so that’s in its third year last year we took in this bit of ground using the compost with black plastic on top that’s now Ry for grain and mustard which has been killed by Frost which is what I want and this is the new ground for this year where we’re going to spread 7 or 8 cm 3 Ines of new compost and it can be anything it doesn’t have to be perfect I mean actually this is really nice home compost that’s some green waste compost we call it which I bought it’s not the best it’s got big wet lumps but fine for this purpose it’s Carbon on the soil to feed the soil life black plastic on top and then we’ll leave that until late May probably 4 months even 3 or 4 months the weeds are mostly dead then we plant squash through the plastic and finally something that often goes with vegetable garden is maybe a few fruit trees this is Apple that we planted a couple years ago and it’s not been growing that fast it’s a bit too close to that big cherry tree taking moisture from it at this time of year I’m looking to prune it maybe quite a bit actually taking off some lower branches and any weaker ones so actually taking out some branches Al together these little ones here cut them quite close to the stem I must emphasize here I’m no expert on fruit trees but I can grow some reasonable trees so I’m giving you just some ideas and don’t be afraid to prune pruning is a way of taking out the weaker growth and getting a nice shape in a tree uh this one definitely did need cutting back a bit that we hadn’t done and even the top so there’s your before and after and this oring well will grow quite strong now that’s an apple on a mediumsized root stock this is an apple also on same root stock M26 and it’s a new tree or newly planted we popped it in a couple of weeks ago made a whole put the tree and bit of compass on top then a cardboard and bit of wood chip yeah you can do variations of that it’s not precise and what I’m looking to do here is take it down quite a lot actually take all of that off the top and then the the branches will develop from there and taking off these little Tiddly ones as well at the bottom don’t need them cuz what at this point in the first year you’re just looking to have a nice strong stem which stuff will grow out of that’s what this is the starting point of a new tree these uh you know you can either do that and just leave them on the ground or you can put them on the compost heap if you prefer I hope you’ve enjoyed having a look around jobs to do in febr it’s a nice relaxed month coming up nothing too urgent or pressing it’s not like in the Summer where everything goes in a rush we’ll come back in March and I’ll give you some ideas for the month ahead [Music] then