First Seeds Sown!

The first seeds have been sown! I have taken the (perhaps) controversial step of sowing directly into homemade paper pots. The idea of this is to save me transplanting them later, which I find a bit fiddley. Also making the pots was fun...
This does create a bit of a problem in the question of how many seeds to sow in each pot. One thing that I have learned however, is that foxglove seeds may well be the smallest things ever invented. So I just went for getting at least 1 in each pot. Bigger seeds were easier. I know you should probably put several in each one, as some won't germinate, but it seems such a waste! So I will keep track of the percentage that germinate, and next year I will have a better idea.

Sown today:
Foxglove 'candy mountain'
Foxglove 'pam's choice'
Lobelia 'cambridge blue'
Cineraria 'silver dust'
Dianthus superbus 'crimsonia'
Antirrhinum 'night and day'

The bigger pots will have sweet peas in them tomorrow; I didn't realise that you have to soak them for 24 hours before sowing them. These are all random seeds that I bought from Wilkos because they were 75% off and I liked the pictures on the packets. Since we have a completely empty garden I reckoned that trial and error is a good way to go forward. The plan is to sow seeds every week or so, so that they are a bit staggered. Not sure if that will work but we will see.

A weekend gardening

We have started on the garden at last! Dad came and put the greenhouse up last year, but we decided to put in some flowerbeds this year. What a job it turned out to be, I must say lifting turf is mighty hard work. At least it was much easier than in the summer, but we had to work quickly to get it done before the light went. Here's Dan hard at work:




An arial picture of the earthworks:



The plan is to fill these beds with flowers this year (many seeds to be planted) and to put a vegetable patch on the left hand side of the garden. We have some more structural work to do on that side, so we will have a vegetable patch there this year, and then next year sort the mess out (take out the hedge on that side and take out the concrete drive and move the shed), and hopefully get an allotment.

We also decided to get rid of this terrible Russian Vine. Man that plant is an evil thing. We cut it back last year but it was still in all the hedge and all over the place. It can only have been a couple of years old at the most (the guy that we bought from planted it) but the trunk was a couple of inches thick in places. Unfortunately it is all tied up with a nice honeysuckle, so we will have to try and work out how to get it out. at the moment we have untangled about half of it, and cut it down to a stump, but we will have to dig it out. Nasty nasty plant.

Nice to be started though!!

Christmas potatoes

Just a quick picture of our first potato harvest that we grew in a large plastic tub in the greehouse. 17 reasonably sized potatos from 2.5 seed potatos isn't too bad!

India

Over Christmas we have been in India. For one week at a wedding of a good friend of ours, Avnish and the rest of the time travelling huge distances around the South.

I commet a bit more on it here.

Photos can be seen here or here.