Spring has truly spring and it is a joy to behold. The unfurling of life is all around and it is exciting to be getting back onto the land to plant, dig and sow. You've likely done a big flush of sowing and are eagerly watching your baby seedlings germinate and grow.

April is another fantastic time to fill up your propagation space and we thought we'd include our 'top crops to sow' for this month below. This list includes vegetables, salads and herbs but also some of our favourite half hardy flowers.

Further down you'll also find our recommendations for direct sowing and keeping your plants properly watered.

Stock up your seed store for all your April sowings here:

Top crops to sow in April

Lettuce

April is the ideal time to sow lettuce and if you've already sown some it's a great idea to stagger your sowings to give you successional harvests all throughout the summer months.

Some of our bestselling lettuce varieties are:

​Wild Garden Mix - an eclectic mix of great varieties, to cover many bases

​Little Gem 'Maureen' - a classic little gem variety, packed full of crunchy sweetness

​Flashy Butter Oak - a very pretty and vigorous oakleaf lettuce with dark red splashes all over pale green leaves

Cucumbers

April is the ideal time to sow your cucumbers for planting inside or out. If they are destined to be grown outside make sure you keep them inside until all danger of frost has passed - they are very sensitive to the cold!

Some of our bestsellers are:

​Marketmore - a versatile, productive variety with luscious, dark green fruits throughout the summer

​Crystal Lemon - a prolific, unusual and old variety of outdoor cucumber; small, round and yellow with a crisp, sweet flavour.

Carrots

Carrots are some of the most satisfying crops to harvest and April is a great time to sow them for a summer harvest. That sweet pop as you pull out a long, crunchy root from the soil is unparalleled!

Here are our bestsellers:

​Nantes - a classic French workhorse variety, very productive and equally delicious

​Lila Lu - a real show-stopper variety, with dark purple outside and bright orange inside

Courgettes

Courgettes are a fantastic summer staple and no allotment or garden is without at least one courgette plant. Now's a great time to sow your first courgettes. Doing another sowing in about 6 weeks time will give you a great succession of harvests into autumn.

Our bestselling varieties are:

​Cocozelle - a highly productive and tasty striped Italian variety

​Black Beauty - a vigorous and prolific courgette producing dark green, glossy fruits over a long period

Basil

Deliciously fragrant, citrusy and versatile, Basil is the queen of summer herbs. There are so many different types of basil out there, it's really worth branching out and trying some of the more exotic types.

Some of our favourites are:

​Sweet Genovese - the classic basil variety, very productive, aromatic and perfect for all culinary uses, especially pesto

​Tulsi - also known as ‘Holy basil’, a wonderful medicinal and culinary basil

​Thai - irreplaceable, anise-flavoured variety used in Asian cooking

Sunflowers

No summer garden or allotment is without the bright, shining face of a sunflower. Easy to grow, abundant to flower and great for pollinators, Sunflowers are an essential addition to your April sowing list.

Here are our top-sellers:

​Floris - a beautiful multi-headed sunflower with blooms of crimson dappled with vanilla

​Sonja - a wonderful multi-headed variety, particularly for cut flower use

​Hopi Black - a heirloom variety stewarded by the Hopi people who used it’s dye in fabrics for basketry

Cosmos

The cut flower growers favourite. Cosmos are an essential addition to any cottage garden. With their delicate blooms, tall frothy stems and an abundance of stems they are truly the workhorse of the garden!

Our bestsellers are:

​Orange - easy to grow with orange flowers on tall stems with fine feathered leaves

​Apricotta - a beautiful variety with flowers like nothing else: apricot to peachy colours with a soft pink towards the centre

​Mixed - white, pink, purple, and lilac petals and a yellow centre

Want to see what else we have in stock? Visit our seed shop below:

Top tips for watering your seedlings:

Sowing is just the first step to raising healthy plants. Keeping seedlings just watered enough is a fine skill and one that takes plenty of experimentation and practice.

You may find each individual crop has specific watering needs or that different sized trays with different module sizes will dry out at different times. It’s important to watch closely to see how your plants react and adjust your watering accordingly.

Proper watering will ensure that your seedlings will develop healthy roots and go on to be healthier, sturdier plants. Watering from above can be an effective technique but it can often be hard to make sure all the parts of the module trays receive an equal amount of water. Other issues that can arise from top watering could be:

• Dislodging small delicate seeds, especially those sown on the surface
• The formation of a hard dry crust which doesn’t allow water to penetrate through, meaning the roots can dry out
• Watering too much and causing plants to get diseases like damping off

Our top tips for watering from above:

• Occasionally check the bottoms of your modules to make sure the water is reaching them efficiently. Consistent, light watering is often more effective than heavy, infrequent watering
• Holding a watering can rose upside down as you water means the water falls more softly, like rain, onto the plants and allows for a more even distribution
• I like to do one quick pass, letting the water soak into the compost, before passing again more thoroughly. This helps the water to fully penetrate the soil and not run off

Our preferred watering method - watering from below:

Watering from below is a much easier way to ensure more even moisture and healthier root development. This also helps to protect any small, delicate seeds as they germinate and establish roots.

We use large gravel trays from Garland - you’re looking for something that fits your seed trays / modules trays inside and doesn’t have any holes.

Once you’ve sown your seeds, place the seed tray inside the larger tray filled with water and allow it to soak from the bottom up. You’ll notice the compost has fully changed colour and is saturated with water when it’s ready. You can then remove any excess water.

Top tips for direct sowing:

With the glorious dry weather we've been having, it's likely your soil has been warming up and you've had the chance to get onto your soil to prepare some beds for planting.

Many things can also be directly sown in April too including beetroot, carrots, chard, cauliflower, kohlrabi, lettuce, leeks, radish, turnip, spring onions, peas and perpetual spinach.

As a result of having less control over conditions, direct-sowing can be less reliable than raising plants in pots or modules, but there are a few things which will help increase your success with this method:

• Make sure that the soil has a nice 'tilth'. This means it should be very fine and crumbly and not rough with big clumps. This will help the seed have good contact with the soil and give a nice texture for the seedlings' roots to grow into
• Always sow into weed-free soil. Some seeds can be slow to germinate and grow compared to their weedy cousins, and can therefore get swamped by weeds very fast if you are not vigilant. Onions and leeks are particularly susceptible to weed-pressure and simply will not grow if they are competing with weeds while very small
• Mix some quick-germinating seeds such as radish in with slower ones such as carrots so you can tell where the rows are and weed more easily and sooner
• If you have space you can sow a few seeds in pots/modules at the same time as direct-sowing and then fill in any gaps which you might have
• Slugs can be an issue with direct-sown seeds, especially if there has been a lot of rain, so do anything that you can to keep them at bay such as removing nearby habitats (long grass, weeds, logs etc)

Enjoy!

All the best and happy seed sowing :)

Chloe and the rest of the team

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P.S. Don't forget to close your propagation space at night - there's still risk of frost!