It's my 1st year growing leaks and followed Charles Dowding who multi sows them and then transplants them as a bunch. They aren't as big as some I've seen but they are very tasty and should see us through till spring if they survive the weather.
I have decided to follow this advice on trimming the roots, I multi sowed them last year and they were still rotten, I am building a 3rd no-dig raised bed thing for them along with some spring onions, I am making it quite high for ease of maintenance.
I've never managed to grow decent leeks before this year. I normally start them off in January with the onions under lights inside. the onions do fine and grow into nice large onions, the leeks, well they look like grass 3 months later when I want to plant them out. and they don't get much larger than my thumb. But this year I bought bareroot plants which were pencil thick and had been trimmed top and bottom, I popped those in the ground and had lovely thick leeks by August/September. (these are summer leeks) Now I did buy 1600 leeks but I think it showed me that it's not worth my trying to start them myself, it's not my soil or climate or anything like that it's my seedling care that is the problem.
I use various F1 variety leek seeds and usually get 100% germination when I sow them individually in root trainer modules in the GH about mid-March. They stay in those until I lift the early potatoes (which they replace as a crop), and are typically pencil-thick by then. When planting out, I also trim the roots by 50%, but I don't bother trimming the leaves and do the classic 'dibber a hole, drop in leek, then water' method. I plant them in a grid rather than rows, about the length of a trowel apart. This has always worked very well.
A trowel in the hand is worth a thousand lost under a bush.
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