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Hi Charles and all gardeners
I recently came across a sewing/growing method called winter sewing. The idea is to mimic nature by sowing outdoors in the winter in closed plastic containers (a kind of mini greenhouse) and leave the seeds to germinate when the conditions are right thus avoiding having to raise seedlings indoors. Since seeds germinate outside, they do not need hardening off and are generally stronger and less prone to damping off.
Does anyone have experience with this? What seeds would be most suitable for winter sewing in this way?
Looking forward to your replies.
Hi Lottie
This worked well with Caucasian spinach, which needs to get cold and with alpine strawberries. However I can see it causing problems with larger seeds such as beans and peas which are much loved by mice and also with things like carrots that I think the slugs would get?Also from a practical point of view I think that you would end up with a significant amount of space taken up over a long period, when you could be growing winter crops.
I have unintended experience in a couple of scenarios:
1. Potatoes definitely appear ‘when the time is ripe’ when you didn’t manage to get every single tuber from the ground one year previous. So I do suspect that you don’t need to ‘chit’ potatoes and you could probably put them in the ground in late November.
2. Tomato seeds ended up in the compost from kitchen waste miraculously started growing in May amongst my parsnips and elsewhere. I”d put the compost down in early March. I let one Maskotka plant keep growing and harvested a few.I think that neither of those two would be used in that way in the normal scheme of things in the UK, although I think that if you decide to create ‘permanent beds’ where you simply grow the same crop each year and either let the seeds fall down or you leave a few tubers in the ground, it might be worth doing.
Obviously different people have different views on whether that’s a good thing. In nature, you have to say that the natural cycle of vegetables is to keep growing in the same place and then occasionally have a bird or whatever eat some seeds and drop them at a new location. Some permaculture proponents also say this works very well, but of course there are plenty who say you will encourage disease.
I wonder if it is all down to the quality of the soil?
Perhaps the weather/ temperature is a big factor in this, and that it is difficult to predict to our advantage. Cold soil would possibly result in seeds rotting and frosts could swing the balance of effort versus reward too far into the negative. Daylight hours might have an impact on growth too.
I once sowed parsnips in November and they emerged in March, very nicely.
But you need weed-free soil/compost as the crop seeds are sitting there so long, there is no chance of hoeing or raking.
I am not convinced that the sewing method gives stronger seedlings, since I observe how strong my plants are, from indoor propagation.
But some plants you buy are not strong as they come from heated greenhouses and are grown in compost with artificial fertiliser.As an addition to Rhys’s comment after seemingly every year getting healthy self set potatoes, as an experiment for 2012 -13 I intentionally autumn planted some saved seed to see how they would do, they actully appeared to sprout and emerge a little later than spring sown though that might have had more to do with the amount of compost I dumped on them, they grew to be very big plants and produced a substantial crop.
I am on very free draining soil and having been no dig for five years now get no water loging problems regardless of the amount of rain there is.
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