The good and the bad

The good:

• there are green tomatoes on both the indoor and outdoor Early Girl plants
• most of my other tomato seeds are germinating quite well
• the strawberries starting to ripen in the beds outside (and in fact I just ate the first one - yum!)
• the potatoes in their plastic bags are growing nicely, and I'm particularly taken with the purple ones, which turned out to have purpley-green leaves as well
  

The bad:

• my Roma tomato seedlings all baked to death, in the conservatory on an unexpectedly hot day
• the lemon tree has shed almost all of its leaves, and will have to be planted outside somewhere - anywhere! - before it expires completely
• something has chewed holes in a lot of the lettuce leaves
• we still haven't finished ripping out the weeds from the veggie garden and putting down the last of the weed matting, so I have no new photos

Maybe this weekend we'll get to grips with the last of it. I will update if we do!

Making the most of a sunny day

We've had some mixed weather recently, with a very cold snap and a lot of rain, so I haven't been out in the garden much. However, today was a beautiful warm sunny day so we took advantage of that and got some work done.

I've finally planted out the potatoes into their plastic bags. This is the first time we've tried this technique, but if it works then harvesting the potatoes will be very easy indeed. I forgot to take a photo of them when I was outside earlier, but right now they just look like a row of plastic bags full of compost - not very exciting really!


The strawberries are coming along quite nicely, and I can see the beginnings of berries on a few of them. These will have to stay covered up with wire netting to keep the birds off.



The silverbeet is thriving, as is Skry's broccoli. I don't know what he's going to do with it all if every plant is ready to eat at the same time! And I've got plenty of lettuce on the go and have been eating that regularly. It's so easy just to go out into the garden with a bowl and a pair of scissors and snip off all the leaves I need for that meal.


You can see that we haven't finished landscaping the garden yet. There is one corner which is still thick with weeds, and we haven't done anything about covering the weed matting. The irrigation system hasn't been finished either, but at least we've made a start on it. Hopefully we'll get the whole thing sorted out before Christmas and it'll all be fairly easy from then on.

I've got to say that Square Foot Gardening seems to be a real labour-saving technique. The only tools that I need are a trowel and a pair of scissors. I've pulled a few weed seedlings from the raised beds from time to time, but way fewer than we pulled from the ground last year. They're also easier to pull out because the soil is so loose, and of course it's easier to spot them early because I know exactly where I should find plants in each square of the grid. If something is not where my spreadsheet says it should be, out it comes!

There's life in the lettuce patch!

The winter lettuces are starting to germinate! Five tiny seedlings are starting to poke their heads up above the soil. Hopefully there'll be another three to follow in the next day or two, since I planted eight seeds, but we'll see.


In other news, I planted some more flower seeds today, indoors in seed raising mix. They are in the conservatory and also inside a covered mini germinator, which should keep them fairly cosy. I planted five each of these seeds:

• nigella
• meadowfoam
• hollyhock (not sure what type - these seeds were donated by a friend)
• nicotiana (tinkerbells)
• stock (dwarf 10 week)
• dianthus (black and white minstrels)
• dianthus (rainbow loveliness)
• dichondra (silver falls)

Those that successfully germinate will be planted indoors for the time being, although some of them are destined for the new flower bed outside when the weather warms up.

First seeds planted

About a week ago I planted some winter lettuce seed in a couple of pots in the conservatory. They haven't sprouted yet but I hope they will do so within the next week or so. The tubs are filled with Mel's Mix, and temperatures in the conservatory are above freezing at night and very warm during the day if the sun's out, so I'm hoping that'll be a nice combination for the little lettuce seeds.

Yesterday I planted four Jingle Bells pepper seeds in a tub (filled with seed raising mix) which is currently in our living room. The temperatures here are more stable than in the conservatory, with less extreme differences between night and day. Hopefully they will germinate. The Jingle Bells peppers are miniature fruits on a plant suitable for growing indoors. We had no luck with our pepper plants growing outside last summer - from about a dozen plants, we got one solitary green pepper - so this year they are all going to be indoors. I've already got some larger tubs to use outside in the conservatory, and I've ordered more seeds (Chocolate Beauty, which has brown fruit, and California Wonder which should result in red peppers when ripe) so hopefully we'll have a bit of variety. Having said that, I'd just be glad to have something we can eat at the end of it all!

Oh, and I scattered some California poppy seeds along the edge of our driveway. It's not really the right time of year for planting poppy seeds but the worst that can happen is that they don't grow. It'd be lovely if they did, though, because the driveway is very bare in places at the moment. We did plant some small shrubs, hebes of various kinds, but it'll be a long time before they grow big enough to merge together. Poppies would be lovely in the meantime.