Sewing the Seeds

Do you remember back in January how we wrote a post about getting on top of the garden? We'd ticked off lots of little jobs and were looking forward to what came next. Well what came next was - you guessed it - the bathroom, and we've not really been in the garden since. Our fairly sorted patio now has a toilet and sink sitting on it, and the old bath is still in the middle of the lawn!

Seed sewing time is upon us though, and regardless of the state of outside we're being hopeful and getting ourselves set up for another year of vegetable growing. We're using our conservatory as a greenhouse once more as this has worked well in the past. This year we've set up a simple set of shelves to rack up all our seedlings on, and over Easter we set about planting some veg.

So far we've sown these:

Broad Beans
Courgettes
Leeks
Peas
Pumpkins
Runner Beans
Salad Leaves
Squashes
Sweetcorn
Swiss Chard

It all sounds quite exciting when its laid out like that. We always try and grow those things that are nicest fresh, and that we eat lots of over the summer months, but this year we've expanded the list by trying to utilise every bit of space we've got, and also to pop in a few autumn and winter veggies too. Sounds like a plan to me....

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Planting 'em up

Last weekend we sat down with our box of seeds for a big sort out. We've thrown out quite a few unfinished packs that were several years old (one of the reasons we think for our poor runner bean harvest last year), and this is what we were left with:

Lots of sweet peas. Anyone who followed our harvest updates last year will know we had great success with these, and had bunches through the house all summer. At the weekend we planted loads again; half a dozen seeds per yoghurt pot. Later on we'll plant one pot per supporting pole of our teepee and then find willing friends for the pots we don't have space for.

We also had some nasturtium seeds. We've tried both planting these straight out and starting them inside with similarly prolific results regardless, so we've decided to go for the lazier option this year and we'll sow these outside in a few weeks. To finish off the flowers we have a mix of annuals. Again, we'll plant these all straight out later in the year.

We found the remains of last years salad seeds - a mix of different leaves plus some rocket. We'll be putting all of these to good use once spring has properly sprung.

A collection of herb seeds also came to our attention. We hadn't done much with herbs last year but decided to give these a go. Firstly some basil mats. These were several years old and should really have gone on the rubbish pile but we decided to give them a chance. To join them we have some slightly newer coriander, parsley, chives and basil seeds (yes, more basil). These have all gone into old yoghurt pots for now, hopefully they'll provide us with nice fresh herbs all summer.

Finally, we also planted our broad beans and peas. These have all gone into plugs made of newspaper so we should be able to plant these straight into the ground, plugs and all, in a few weeks.

All our seeds are currently sitting in our conservatory in lieu of a greenhouse or cold frame. It's not as warm as the rest of the house so makes a good gardening room for the moment.

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