Sowing Sunday

Sunday, I decided not to head to the gym for my class and stayed home instead.  OH had the car to go to a cycling event and neither LB or myself fancied the bus trip across town to the gym, so I cancelled.

As we'd picked up some compost from the garden centre the night before, on our way out for something to eat, I decided to spend the morning in the garden sowing seeds.  OH had tipped a couple of bales of compost into the second bed, so that is now full enough and ready for planting up. I just don't have any plants to put in at the moment, hence the seed sowing, as I don't want to buy all of the plants.

I am intending to buy some sweetcorn plants, as I've seen some in a local shop priced at £4 for a tray of 12. I sowed courgettes, cucumbers, fennel, peppers, a few sunflowers and sweet peas into small pots in the greenhouse.

I also filled the recycling bin with compost and sowed some turnips, beetroot and broccolli into this. This should give me enough plants to keep me going both at the allotment for the remains of this season and for the garden at home. I just need to buy some climbing french or runner bean seeds to sew into the second bed and the sweet corn plants and I'm done.

I'm hoping to make the second bed into a kind of three sisters bed, with beans, sweetcorn and courgettes/cucumbers growing up and around each other. I'm not sure if this will work, but I've always wanted to give it a try.

We also bought some tomato plants at the garden centre, which I rarely do, as I usually get them from a local shop.  What sold me was that they were selling trays of six small plants, all of which were a different variety.

I've now potted them up in the greenhouse and I've got one each of Gardener's Delight (baby red), Valencia (regular red), Roma (small plum red), Marmande (beef tomatoes), Sun Gold (small yellow) and Alicante (also regular red), so this should give me a good selection of different fruit if they all survive, and help make my salads a little more interesting.

I remembered yesterday, that I'd bought a block of coir compost from Oxfam back before Christmas, so I decided to hydrate it, to make a large bucketful and this is what I used to sew most of the seeds into. It's the first time I've used it and it seemed to work quite well. As seeds don't tend to need an overly nutritious blend of compost, because they hold all the nutrients they need to start growing, it should be perfect for germination.  Let's hope so anyway.

A productive weekend in the garden that's got me up to date with regard to the vegetable growing side of things.  Now I can sit back and just watch things grow for a couple of weeks.

By the way, if anyone wants a packet each of Leek (Musselburgh), Aubergine (Black Beauty) and Pointed Green Cabbage (Greyhound) seeds with a sow before date of Nov/Dec 16, please leave an email address and I'll contact you for an address to send them to.  I won't be sowing these as we don't eat them, so they are free to a good home. UK only though I'm afraid.