There is an old gardening saying that if you can sit on the ground with your trousers down, the soil’s warm enough for sowing. I don’t intend to undress in the garden to test the soil temperature, but we did sit on the sunny lawn yesterday afternoon and felt that spring is in the air.

Excitingly, it’s time to sow seeds outside.

I made a small start about 10 days ago, sowing radish, broccoli and choy sum into one of the new raised beds. Some of those seeds have sprouted already, which convinces me that outdoor sowing will be ok.

Seeds are sprouting in the veg bed! These were sown outdoors ten days ago: radish, choy sum, and broccoli raab. #gardenlife #seedlings #springiscoming #growyourown #vegetables #doingtheplan #loveit

A post shared by Jenny Macdonald (@jens_greenhouse) on Mar 16, 2017 at 3:05am PDT

Yesterday evening I sorted out my seed collection, which had been getting rather disorganised. I counted 24 packets of seeds sown so far, and have a group of 36 more that I want to do before the end of March.

This basket of seeds, sorted by sowing month, is my seed filing system and sowing to-do list. I generally don’t like to spend ages listing a plan of action in great detail, because it’s quicker to JFD (just freaking do it).

However, I do find it useful and motivating to detail what has been done.

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. – Robert Louis Stevenson

My ‘done’ list of sown seeds is now organised and online:

And now that I have sowing data, I can get a little geeky with it. I can see that half the seeds sown so far were herbs.

I could pretend this was a conscious plan in order to get maximum flavour from the garden as quickly as possible. But it wasn’t. I’d better sow some veg and flower seeds soon!