Kitchen Garden Forum

Just received my seed parcel from Australia! Nothing fancy & look very familiar but some names are different. What I do like is the little divisions of the Aussie map dividing the regions into temperate, tropical etc with different growing instructions.

Given the vast differences in the UK weather I'm surprised the seed companies here haven't clocked on to it. Being in the South I can start things so much earlier than you guys further North but we have the same sowing & planting times on the packets & I only found confidence to try things earlier after a few years of religiously following the instructions.

Westi

Morning Westi, I remeber all the old gardening presenters would give the North, South, planting time differences, but you don't seem to here it quite as often now, (i know what they will be talking about on GQT this weekend, now).

I think all the seed companies are always too busy trying to sell gimicky things, to be bothered with important things like timing and weather zones.

I think that most sowing instructions have given up on making pronouncements about sowing times for different regions as a hiding to nothing. The UK's maritime climate and the chaotic behaviour of the jet stream muddy the waters also, creating differences in not only the north and south, but also east and west. And then some years turn out just plain weird: you could not have made any direct sowings in March last year, no matter where you were in the country, because of the snow. Climate is what we expect, but weather is what we get.

Commercial growers, if they are shrewd, use day degrees to inform their sowing times. I've seen these printed on seed packets marketed in the States, with its varied climate zones. By correlating day degrees with local average temperatures, sowing times and predicted harvesting times can be fairly accurately determined.