Weather
After fairly low temperatures and clearer skies until this Friday, 30. January, we
Expect more unsettled weather, with showers or longer spells of rain for many places and occasionally rather windy with slightly warmer air from the south east for the rest of next week. Some hill snow is likely in the north too.
Temperatures will be close to average for most, but perhaps rather cold in the far northeast.
Greenhouse, Cold Frame and other Covered Spaces
You might have managed to fork or dig your soil in all covered spaces last week and also outdoors.
If you were lucky and your moist soil was exposed for a few days to frost,
your rough clods would now have been broken down by the weathering forces of the frost expanding the water in the soil clods by 9 % in volume.
When the frost subsides the soil particles stay separated and create, what we call a natural crumb structure, through this weathering process.
Now it is time to employ the old tradition of the “dead seed bed preparation” technique.
Gardeners and farmers would cultivate the soil a couple of weeks before sowing or planting by raking the soil into a seed bed.
This encourages weed seed germination. The weed seedlings are subsequently hoed into the soil just before sowing the vegetable seeds.
This practice will give the vegetable seeds a head start over the weed seeds that might remain in the garden bed in question and save you a lot of weeding.
To amplify this impulse for germinating all latent weed seeds, there is a well proven biodynamic seed bed preparation technique which is even more effective and will secure higher yields.
Biodynamic Dead Seed Bed Preparation
Rake the garden bed to create a seed bed. To encourage higher weed seed germination
rate, cultivate the garden beds with the Moon in the constellation of the Lion (Leo).
Follow this up by cultivating the beds with the Moon in the Goatfish (Capricorn).
This will inhibit the germination of weed seeds but won’t affect your germination rate of your vegetable seeds!
Another additional trick could be when you cultivate the beds when the sky is overcast, at night or with a descending and waning Moon to lower the weed seed germination rate even more.
I highly recommend the biodynamic method of creating a dead seed bed.
The best time for doing so this coming month is from the 2. – 4. February (incl.) except for the 3. February after 3pm. (See also dates in the 2026 GYOH Calendar)
I am looking forward to hearing about your experience of applying this methodology.
The next post will be on making sowing and potting mixes
With jolly gardening wishes
Hans-Günther
