my swede :(

[treeniee]

I am a newbie to gardening and growing veg and very much like some advice please.
I planted some swede plants (already started for garden centre) about 2 months ago and they are now standing 90cm tall and some started flowering. I was told to pull them so I pulled 1 and there is nothing there just roots! Any reason why? Or did I do something wrong or not done something???? PLEASE HELP

[binley100]

Swede take a long time to grow and you don't usually sow them till may/june time .....if they are flowering it's cos they've bolted and will put their energy into flowering and setting seed instead of bulking up a nice fat root...

[treeniee]

Thankyou so much for your reply. So does that mean they won't grow into swedes then ? If so is there anything I can do next time to help prevent this from happening?

[binley100]

If they are flowering then the roots would just be woody anyway. Didn't know you could buy swede as seedlings , the packets usually say to sow direct. But saying that I sow mine in modules and plant out once they've got going. I sowed mine at the in May and they were planted out last weekend . Bolting has a lot to do with the weather conditions, maybe needed more regular watering......

[mrbadexample]

I think you could probably get away with re-sowing now. I always used to sow mine too early, too.

[treeniee]

Thankyou all x will try again x

[solway cropper]

Garden centres really are causing a lot of problems for new growers by selling things that have little or no chance of surviving. I mean, who the heck transplants carrot seedlings!!

One place near me had runner bean plants on sale at the end of April. We can still get frosts till late May up here so what's the point?

Last year a local Been and Queued was selling tomato plants which were badly affected by blight. All they need to do is employ just one person who has even basic knowledge of plants but they won't do that because then they couldn't sell rubbish to unsuspecting punters.

Sorry, but Garden centres are not my favourite places.

[Alison]

They should get 3' tall either so I'd suspect that you didn't really do anything wrong but that the conditions weren't great from when they were sown by the garden centre and then the weather afterwards. I find sowing directly works very well for the likes of swedes and turnips. I just sprinkle a two or three seeds a few inches apart and then thin out to a single plant after later. The biggest problem you can have with them is cabbage whites which love to eat any brassica leaves so I enviromesh them all. They seem to do well with minimal effort and only bolt come next spring.