Out to the greenhouse

No room at this inn ……

With the warm and sunny weather continuing throughout this week and the seedlings in the propagators quickly outgrowing their nursery conditions, I made the decision to start moving the plants into the greenhouse and have been steadily potting them on, one tray at a time, and already the larger greenhouse is almost full. Mud has informed me more than once that we will no doubt find ourselves in the midst of another freezing cold spell in a day or two but, as Middle Mudlet was happy to point out, that’s what horticultural fleece is for and we have enough to provide protection for everything in the greenhouses.

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Asparagus Pea

This is a record of how long this particular set of seeds took to germinate and how they looked at various stages from first appearance to the development of the first set of true leaves and beyond. I hope this will prove useful.

 

Variety: Asparagus Pea
Sown direct: 2nd April 2018
First Seedling: 8th April 2018
Germination: 6 days
Germination ratio: 2/10

And then there was greenery …..

And there I saw a spike of green …..

Yesterday, the Mudlets were excited to see that in three of the four propagators we planted up last week, there are signs of life. Radish and mixed lettuce have appeared in the green propagator. Mangetout, climbing beans and a runners are popping up in one of the black propagators and mixed winter squash are peeking out in a second black propagator. Still no signs of life in the third black propagator which is home to pumpkins and another winter squash variety, or in Little Mudlets rose tin but Middle Mudlet has emerging seedlings in her tin of Gerbera. I don’t realistically expect the roses to appear for at lest another seven days, though, so all is well.

Seeds, seedlings and a tin of Red Roses

I fell for the ‘Scardy Cat’ label

Every year there comes a point where every available windowsill in the house is home to seeds and/or seedlings because I need to get on with this years crops but it is far too cold to be setting seed in the greenhouses and if I wait any longer then many of the vegetables won’t be ready before the growing season comes to an end.

We have seedlings

‘Hot Curry’ chilli pepper seedlings

It has been 3 weeks since the Mudlets sowed the tomato, chilli and sweet pepper seeds and, for the most part, we have had a good number of seeds successfully germinate, resulting in a respectable quantity of seedlings standing tall across two propagators. The propagators have been housed on two windowsills during the day but have spent the night-time on the kitchen worktops, near to the Rayburn, to keep warm and help with germination. It has been bitterly cold most nights which is why I have been moving the propagators away from the windowsills – it is quite surprising just how much cold air window glass can generate, rather like a greenhouse in reverse I guess.

“And there I saw a spike of green”

Melon seedlings just 5 days after sowing

The wait between sowing seeds and seeing the first seedlings emerge, can be a tense one in my experience, especially if you are waiting for seeds with a very long germination period (chillies and parsnips for example). So it’s always something of a relief to spot the first spikes of green beginning to unfurl from beneath the compost.

Butternut Squash seeds from a shop bought fruit.

They look healthy enough but time will
tell if they’ll be any good.

As I was preparing a shop bought Butternut Squash a week or so ago, I thought how lovely and healthy the seeds were looking. Now baring in mind the fact that I already have 6 Winter Squash seedlings through, not forgetting 6 pumpkin “Invincible”, 6 pumpkin “Jack O’Lantern” and 4 pumpkin “Sweetie pie”, sowing yet more squash seeds was not high on my list of priorities.

A bit of squash (and other things)

The nearest propagator houses the winter squash and pumpkin seeds and the other is home to the flowers and courgettes.

As a result of my potting on, I suddenly found myself with a load of empty propagators and windowsills which could only mean one thing…. time to sow a load more seeds! I rifled through my seed drawers and to my absolute glee, realised that it was time to start sowing my winter squash and pumpkin seeds.

Improvisation in the greenhouse

The areas under the fleece frames are full to bursting

You may remember that back in February I thought that I had a problem called ‘Damping Off‘ in my seed trays, as my seedlings did not appear to be doing so well. So to ensure that we had sufficient tomato, chilli, sweet pepper and cucumber plants for the year, I sowed a whole load more and hoped for the best. Well it would appear that ‘Sods Law’ has kicked in because despite my fears to the contrary, the original batch of seedlings all pulled themselves together and suddenly decided to thrive which I am convinced wouldn’t have happened, had I not sown replacement seeds (that’s the ‘Sods Law’ bit) AND the replacement seeds have also germinated in huge numbers and thrived.

The sweet corn sprouted

Can you see the tiny tips of the shoots. They’re much bigger now!

Out of the four sweet corn kernels I took from my saved cob (post here), three germinated successfully. Initially it looked like all four had started to throw out a root but one stopped at a couple of millimeters but still, a 75% germination rate is pretty impressive in my biased opinion, especially from saved seed. Of course getting the seed to germinate is only part of the story and the real test will come as the season progresses and the plants grow, hopefully producing their own fat, juicy ears in due course.