There can now be no pretence that anything else is going to ripen in the greenhouse this year. A greenhouse can do a lot but the clocks have changed, the dark is creeping in, and the weather has cooled, and we have to give up thinking that those final rays of low sunlight might turn the last tomatoes from green to red. They have to be relegated to the kitchen as they are, and then cooked up with vinegar and spices to bottle into chutney to eat through the winter months.
The tomatoes bottled, and the remnants of the last sad cucumbers piled onto the compost heap, there is now space for something else. It doesn’t feel like a time for new starts, but the joy of being a gardener is that there is always another season, and we can always start getting ahead. And this is in fact the perfect time for sowing two crops for next spring and early summer: peas and broad beans. Both are hardy, and sowing them now will give a good chance of an early crop next year.
You can sow both direct outdoors, and in fact I have done that too. With both peas and broad beans you can never really tell what the winter is going to throw at them whether indoors or outdoors is going to win, and I find it best to take a belt and braces approach. Those grown indoors will germinate and grow quicker, and in a gentle spring will get away and flower and pod first. Those in the ground will grow slower but also tougher, and that might mean that they survive late winter and early spring frosts better than those started indoors. And yet again it might rain all winter and the roots of those grown outdoors could just rot off – and then the greenhouse grown ones will swoop in to the rescue. Put simply, both is best.
One of the most important factors in overwintering these crops is choice of variety. You can’t just sow any old variety and expect it to thrive when grown through winter, you want to most robust types for the job. For broad beans look for varieties such as ‘Meteor’, ‘Aquadulce Claudia’ and ‘Super Aquadulce’ which are well known for their good overwintering abilities. Pea ‘Douce Provence’ is an old variety that is very good for overwintering and produces pods of sweet, succulent peas from May onwards, and you could also try ‘Meteor’, ‘Avola’ and ‘Feltham First’. These are all hardy and particularly robust varieties that can stand up to what winter throws at them and are less likely to suffer from rotting off or to be hit by frosts than those varieties that you sow in spring to grow through the summer.
Peas in particular have deep roots, so you should sow them into long pots that will allow these roots to develop. You might sow them individually into rootrainers, specifically designed for such crops, or push a load in around the edges of one big pot – take care not to plant them too close though or moulds can set in in the cool and damp winter conditions. Broad beans grow big fast, and will benefit from being sown one or two to a small pot. Both sets should germinate pretty quickly, even in the current cool weather, and once they have reached a few inches in height you can pinch them out and set them in the greenhouse to grow slowly over winter, developing good roots and a bushy habit, ready to be planted out next spring.