Holiday List Item 4 (and teensy bit of Item 5) – Tick!

Yoghurt pots make handy compost scoops.

Ordinarily, at this time of year, I would temporarily turn the kitchen floor into a makeshift potting shed and spend a pleasant hour or so sowing more seeds into various sized seed trays and propagators. Plastic sheeting would be laid over the carpet tiles with the bag of seed compost, a large black catch-all tray in which the seed trays are placed whilst they are filled with compost, the propagators themselves, already written labels, my small watering can and last but by no means least, the seed packets, all carefully laid out on the sheeting.

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Then there are the ‘Grow-your-own’ Christmas Trees

A future Mudville Christmas tree may be cocooned in this pod

During our visit to Fillinghams’ Christmas Tree farm back in December, I spotted some packets of ‘Grow-your-own’ Christmas Trees for the bargain price of 99p each. I thought that these would be a fun thing for the youngest Mudlets to try to grow, so we paid for two of them and the girls were delighted with this extra purchase. All through Christmas the pods were proudly kept with their sleigh gifts and Christmas toys, waiting for the day when we could plant them …… and that day was today.

The Mudlets’ sow some seeds

Middle Mudlets’ propagator

“Can I have my own propagator to look after, please mum?” Middle Mudlet asked me the other day. Well what could I say, after all my whole ethos with the school garden has been to encourage the children to develop a love of all things green and growing and so I decided that the next round of seed sowing could be given over to the girls, under supervision.

Another year, another season begins

Ready to start.

A little while ago I sorted through my seeds, throwing away the very out of date ones, seeing what I had left and making a list of what I needed to buy. Thankfully I’d managed to buy several packets of fresh seed, in various sales at the end of last summer and so I only had half a dozen packets to buy. My next job was to draw up a seed sowing timetable and for this I decided to utilise the calendar and Quick Note app on my phone.

Seedlings, seeds and a bug.

Grown from seed last year, this giant pansy was well worth the effort.

The continued cold nights are really beginning to get to me now, as I really do think it’s high time that 4C and below no longer featured so heavily, thereby negating the need for me to spend time carefully trying to ensure that all my seedlings are snug and warm, tucked up under fleece. With some of the tomato seedlings now relying on the support of short plant sticks to remain upright, the job of ensuring that my meager supply of fleece reaches all corners of the seedling rows, without huge gags appearing between sections, has got that little bit more difficult. No, all things considered, I think it’s time for night time temperatures to start getting their act together and remaining above the 5C mark, at least for the majority of the time.

Signs of life

Look! Can you see them? Tiny little roots

You may recall from my last post, that when I sowed my second batch of Stupice tomato saved seeds the other day, I soaked them overnight in some damp kitchen towel to rehydrate them prior to sowing, instead of just sowing them direct into the compost which I did with the first batch. As I had re-hydrated far more seed than I actually needed for my seed tray, I decided that I would keep the left over seed on the damp kitchen towel to see if these would germinate, as this would potentially give me a clue as to what may be happening, out of sight, buried in the compost. The idea was that if nothing happened with the seeds on the kitchen towel and after a week or so there was no signs of life in the seed tray modules either, then I could safely assume that the seed was not viable.

Stupice tomato saved seed, a no show

Saved seed before rehydration

That’s the thing with saving your own seed, there are no guarantees that your efforts will result in viable seed but you have to give it a try. So far this year I’ve sown two saved seed tomato varieties and four chilli varieties. It is still too soon for the chilli seeds to have germinated but the same is not true for the tomatoes and the three varieties of shop bought packets of tomato seed, as well as the saved seed Amish Paste Tomato are all through and standing tall. Alas, this is not the case for the saved seed tomato variety, Stupice.

And so it begins…..

The very useful windowsill propagators

… the process of growing our food that is. With the propagators, seed trays and labels washed and ready for use, a nice new bag of seed compost ready and waiting for the sowing process to begin, all that remained for me to do was to sort out my seeds, set out a potting area on the kitchen floor where there is plenty of space and any spillages can be easily dealt with, and get on with it. Unfortunately and in the best tradition of “the best laid plans…..”, sowing seeds had to be temporarily placed on hold when I was struck down by a dreadful cold which knocked me sideways for a few days.

Preparing to sow

It’s cold outside in my poor, neglected garden

It has been a long time since I posted about my garden which, I will admit here and now, has been woefully neglected throughout the last few months. The doldrums into which I fell as a result of the negativity surrounding the school garden, had an unexpected, knock on effect on my overall attitude to gardening, resulting in an almost total abandonment of my own plot.

Bargains for the garden

See, it’s not just vegetables I grow from seed: mixed flowers.

I’ve had a busy few days across three garden, what with potting on dozens of flower seedlings on Sunday, the shrub clearance on Monday and hours of watering in our garden, watering and picking vegetables in the school garden and watering a friends patch whilst she was away. I also popped over to the garden centre on Sunday, to pick up some plant food and whilst I was there I had a mooch about which is always easier to do and a much more relaxed experience, when I haven’t got Mud and the Mudlets with me, either wanting to get done asap (Mud) or wanting to see ALL the fish and ALL the dinosaurs AGAIN (the Mudlets). Yes, you really can find moving and noisy dinosaurs in our local garden centre ……. well why wouldn’t you?