Leeks are part of the allium family which we eat every day of the year. Leeks are especially important because they are available fresh from the ground all through winter and into spring, when we would otherwise depend on stored onions, or salad onions. With a bit of planning you can eat leeks and leek alternatives for most, if not all of the year, see my year round growing guide for more details.
I use a rating system to help me decide what to grow and it considers lots of factors, but the main ones are: how tasty it is, how healthy it is to eat, how expensive it is to buy, how big it's harvest is, when it's harvest period is and whether I can buy it organically and if not how much it's sprayed by commercial growers.
Leeks store fairly well in this system. They give an important harvest at a time of year when food is scarce, they are very healthy and versatile in cooking. They do however take up a lot of space, for a long time and only a moderate yield. They are not that expensive to buy but quite difficult to get hold of grown organically.
I’ve tried to develop growing techniques that mitigate the fact that they take up a lot of space as you will see below.
Grow as many as you think you can eat from October until April, but unless you have a lot of space I’d not grow more than 1m2 per person. If you sow summer leeks too, then sow about the number you think you will eat from July until October.
Leeks are quite a flexible plant. They will grow ok in containers, they interplant very well and are easy to transplant.
Leeks are typically sown in winter or early spring, for a harvest in autumn, through to spring when they go to seed. However they often go to seed earlier due to the interplay of several factors, which people generally describe as stress, a combination of planting at the wrong time, too much heat, too little water etc.
<aside> 💡 This tendency to go to seed prematurely is one of the many reasons that I like to sow several successions, in multiple locations.
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Since leeks occupy the ground for so long and provide such a relatively small harvest I almost always interplant them, or I plant them late, so that they come after my winter and spring harvests. This way I find that I still get a reasonable yield from the ground over the year as a whole.
<aside> 💡 For more details on the model that I use for describing harvest periods (first earlies, second earlies etc) please see the chapter on my growing framework
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https://airtable.com/shrVVh8fSelI2rM99
<aside> 💡 Let me declare my bias: I think people tend to sow their leeks much too early. Although leeks will grow early in the year, they don’t need to be sown this early they are just as successful sown later and probably less prone to going to seed early.
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