My Babies

This year is very late in getting going, or rather, I am rather late in getting going. The weather has been pretty uninspiring for gardening, although the couple of fine frosty weeks in late Feb/early March allowed me to get some of the beds in the allotment sorted for the summer. However, now that we are back to the sleet and rain and gloom, I have only recently thought about my seeds and getting stuff planted.

So two weeks ago, I sent off for my seeds from The Organic Gardening Catalogue, and now have my spuds chitting in the greenhouse, my garlic planted at the allotment, and a clatter of seeds sown in modules. I sowed lettuce, mizuna, rocket, broad beans, parsley, sweet pea and scallions, and some of them were up within 4 days. It helped that they were sitting beside the range, and now they are on the upstairs south-facing windowsill where they can get any sunshine that sneaks through the clouds.

There’s no way anything (except the weeds) is going to germinate outside for at least a month or 6 weeks, so I will keep sowing and potting on and building up a supply of hardy seedlings, slug-ready and fit for a life in the open ground. Last year I was starting all this in early February, but growing is a very forgiving activity and everything has an amazing ability to catch up.

The difficulty I had last year was that the growing season was dominated by cool and dull weather, so many of the plants that are associated with milder climates really struggled, such as sweetcorn. I will try again, and as ever, will retain the perennial optimism of the GIY-er.

My wee babies