Our own growing
How we test
Planting dates, spacing and depths in Sowstory come from published growing guidance for England, with the source kept for every value. Alongside that, we grow crops ourselves and write down what actually happened, including what went wrong. You will find these notes in a few guides, in a box called “From our own trial”.
Our trial this season
Long troughs about 49 × 15 × 15 cm on a shelf on a sheltered north-east-facing balcony, with no direct sun on the shelf, in a milder climate than most of England. Ordinary LED battens added on 29 September, on from 7am to 7pm (to 6pm from mid-October). Autumn 2026.
That is not an English raised bed, so we never use it to set dates, spacing or yields in the planner. It is useful for the parts that are the same everywhere: raising seedlings, thinning, transplanting, giving peas something to climb, and spotting problems early.
How we label what we write
- SeenWe saw it ourselves, and the photos show it.
- Our estimateA rough figure we judged by eye. It was not measured.
- HypothesisA possible reason. We did not test it, so we do not present it as the cause.
- Not knownWe did not record it. We would rather say so than guess.
Photos and illustrations
Photos from our trial are labelled “Photo from our trial” and are not edited beyond cropping and hiding device labels. Every other picture on the site is an illustration or a diagram and is labelled as one.
What we will not do
We do not invent harvests, dates, varieties or diagnoses. When we did not record something, the note says “Not known”. Your garden, weather and soil will give different results, so use the planner for your own dates.
Guides with notes from our trial
