Making a start on the veggie beds

I made a real start on the back garden veggie beds today. It's still only early August, but the weather has been just glorious, warm and sunny, so it's perfect for gardening.


We only had a few bags of compost to hand so I just filled one bed with Mel's Mix and the other one is still empty. The 2m x 1m bed took three 40 litre bags of compost, half a big bag of peat, and half a bag of vermiculite to fill nearly to the top, and I've still got to top it up to the brim once I buy more supplies. It was hard work lugging all the bags around, but at least I only need to do it once for each bed! After that they'll just need topped up with a little compost every time new plants go in there, which should be easy to manage.

The rest of the garden still looks a mess, but already we can see how fantastic it's going to look when it's all done up properly. We've got another three beds planned for this area, and some free space in the back corner that might be used for an asparagus bed. Haven't quite decided yet.

Mould!

I just noticed that the five tubs of seed mixture that I have in the living room (pansy, lavender, and sweet pepper) have gone MOULDY and are covered in white fluffy stuff. Yuck. I've never seen this happen before! I've got no idea what's going on - I'm pretty sure I haven't been over-watering them, but I can't think of what else might have caused it.

For the moment, I've moved them all to the sunny windowsill rather than the rather darker corner behind the curtains. If it persists, I'll probably have to throw them out. The first casualties of summer 2009 and they didn't even get a chance to germinate. Bah.

Onions, onions everywhere

Well, not quite onions everywhere, but I have high hopes for the future. Eighteen red onion seeds, 18 white onion seeds, and 18 spring onion seeds have just been potted up in some lovely damp seed-raising mix, along with half a dozen chocolate pepper seeds just to fill up the rest of the tray. In fact I planted a whole lot of seeds today:

• red onion (sweet red)
  
• white onion (Kiwi gold)
• spring onion
• pepper (chocolate beauty)
  
• swan plant
• gilia (bird's eye)
  
• marigold
• mint
  

My Meyer lemon got re-potted too, as it's looking a bit under the weather at the moment. It was sadly neglected for the last few months, and when I finally took a proper look at it I discovered that it was infested with greenfly and most of its leaves were yellow or dropping off. Poor lemon tree. The last few weeks I've been spraying it with insecticide, feeding it, and trying to clean the sticky honeydew off its leaves (with limited success, it has to be said). Hopefully it will perk up a bit now.

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.

More seeds planted

This is probably not very interesting for anyone to read, but I figure it'll be a good record for me and might help me figure out what works in future. I planted some more indoor seeds today: pansies and lavender. I'm trying to produce some lavender plants to grow down our driveway, but apparently it can be quite difficult to grow from seed so I shouldn't get my hopes up.


I was going to leave them in the conservatory beside the lettuce (in the square tubs above) but it gets really cold out there at night. The flower pots are now in the corner of our living room beside the Jingle Bell pepper seeds, where they get sunshine during the day and some heat from us during the evening.

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.

Finished the flower bed

I finished the flower bed today, with the addition of a bag of pig compost and a grid layout made with garden twine. I think it looks great! And the soil is just so gorgeous, light and nutritious.




Well, I say "finished", but there is one more thing to do and that is to tack a chicken wire fence around the edge. With three of our own chickens plus countless neighbourhood cats looking for a litter box, I think that soil will be just too tempting. But for the moment there is nothing growing in that bed, and there won't be for a few weeks, so I've put down a temporary barrier of left-over fencing. It should flummox the cats, anyway!