Sowing the first seeds of the year

Spring around the corner

It’s been sunny and frosty for a lot of this week – weather that is beautiful in itself, but that also gives you hope and anticipation of spring just being around the corner. As a result I’ve been itching to get going in the garden and on the allotment, and that itch has translated into getting some new kit to expand my growing possibilities this year…

Upping my propagation game

There are some seeds that like to get started early, but you can only really do that if you have lights and heating. I’ve never had heating or lights before, I’ve just grown early seedlings indoors on a windowsill, which tends to result in quite weak, leggy plants that never really thrive from that point on.

So this month I’ve bought a small lighting / propagation rig and heated mat so I can get things going early and then transfer them into my new grow house once it’s up and running.

The lighting / propagation rig is a Garland Grow Light Garden. It’s quite pricey, which is why I’ve never bought one before, but I’m really pleased with it. There’s a bit of assembly involved but it’s fairly straightforward. You can adjust the height of the lights as the plants grow, and there’s a capillary mat and reservoir built in to keep seedlings nicely moist as they grow. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it fares in a dark corner of my living room.

This weekend I’ve sown:

• Pepper Semaroh from The Real Seed Company, one of my favourite places to buy seed – the quality is good, and I like the ethos of providing seeds that will grow into plants that produce seeds you can then use next year. I chose this variety for its compactness (so it will fit into my new mini growhouse) and because it’s meant to be well-suited to the weather in the UK.
• Pepper Snackable Orange from Marshalls – one for a pot on my patio, or possibly the new raised veg bed (see below…)
• Erigeron Karvinskiamus ‘profusion’ – a lovely little daisy-like plant that I love having dotted around the garden in pots or at the front of borders in the summer – it flowers for ages and seems to like living in quite small pots
• Foxglove Pam’s Split – a white flower with purple splashes of colour, ideal for my mainly white and purpose garden – I’m growing it as an annual for the back of my border in summer, but for now it will stay indoors and then in the growhouse until it’s strong enough to be planted out, after the last frosts
• Cobaea Scandens alba – I love this annual tender climber, it has the most beautiful very pale green flowers – last year I sowed it too late and it grew only to a metre or so and only started flowering very late in the summer; I’m hoping by getting it started early I can get it to grow bigger and flower earlier and longer this year
• Ipomoea Purpurea Grandpa Ott – another tender annual climber with beautiful purple trumpet flowers; this one is for my sunny wall where the clematis and rose aren’t yet covering the whole wall
• Cineraria Maritima Silverdust – lovely silver foliage to dot around the garden as a foil for the green ferns and other foliage – the flower seeds are all from Sarah Raven, whose website I can only visit occasionally because it is so full of amazing seeds and plants it’s hard to resist ordering many more than I have room for in my small garden….
• I’m waiting for my chilli seeds to arrive this week – as soon as they’re here I’ll sow them too. I’m already a bit late for them really, they should ideally be sown first half of January. But hopefully they’ll catch up once they get going.

A new raised bed for veggies

Also this week, the new raised bed arrived for the front garden. We have a small space mainly used for parking the car with a small lavender bed around the edge and a few shrubs, but there’s a bit of spare space on one side.

I had been thinking I might put a small greenhouse there, but I’ve now established (thanks to a friend who asked the question I’d not considered!) that I can’t put a greenhouse in the front garden without planning permission. Getting planning permission is a very expensive, time-consuming process that I’d rather avoid getting involved in unless I have to. So I thought: why not try one of these raised beds instead?

This is part of my ongoing quest to grow all my own salad leaves all year round so I never have to buy them in a plastic bag at the supermarket – home-grown taste much better, and there’s no plastic involved either. I manage this fairly well in the summer, but much less well in the winter when it’s too dark to go up to the allotment after work to collect stuff to eat. I’m thinking perhaps a raised bed just outside the front door, raised off the ground away from the cold and wet, easily accessible all year round could be just the thing?

The front garden gets a good dose of sunlight after mid-day (it’s west-facing) so I reckon this will be a good place to grow peppers, bush tomatoes, salad leaves and a few herbs over the summer, and winter salad leaves, radishes and spring onions over winter. It comes with a frame and a plastic cover to turn it into a mini-polytunnel so should be good for early-sown salads and other plants that would struggle up on the allotment but might manage under cover in our sheltered front drive until warmer weather comes in summer.

I’ve filled the raised bed with homemade compost from the hot composter and the cool compost bin, topped up with rotted manure we had delivered a few weeks back for the allotment this spring. The home-made compost is lovely, rich and crumbly and absolutely teeming with worms that can carry on digesting the bits that haven’t fully broken down yet. It should hold water really well and be full of nutrients, so I’m hoping it will make a great growing medium for hungry veg. The idea is to use the compost for a year in the raised bed and then spread it as a mulch on the garden beds afterwards so the soil can benefit from the organic matter.

I absolutely love the idea of growing veggies in compost made out of our leftover food and garden waste. Putting the bed together and filling it up made my heart just sing. I can’t wait to start sowing seeds and planting things in there.

For now I’m going to leave the compost to settle for a couple of weeks, then top it up again with more compost (I’m assuming it will sink a bit as it settles). By mid-February it should be ready for the first winter lettuces to be planted out – I’ve got some young plants I sowed in the autumn, they’ve been in the cold frame all winter and should grow away well once the weather warms up and the days get a bit longer.

And then, before we know it, spring will be underway and the growing season will be taking off quicker than I can keep up with it. Bring it on 🙂