This week: frost, seedlings, unfurling leaves

Frost

There have been a few frosty nights this week even in London, so all the plants that might get upset by that came inside for a few days in the house. Unfortunately, I did that too late for the poor cucumber plants that I sowed and put out into the mini greenhouse much too early….

I had put a small paraffin lamp in the growhouse hoping that would offer some protection, but it wasn’t powerful enough to heat the space and didn’t seem to make very much difference at all. So today I bought a new one from Homebase which seems to be working much better: at 845pm, the outside temperature is 6C but inside the growhouse it’s currently 14C.

This is really exciting, because it means I can safely put my tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, chillis, squashes, cucumbers and tender flowering plants out, once I’ve cleared the growhouse of all the hardy seedlings that need planting out on the allotment. This is a massive relief because I’ve got quite a few plants ready to go out and currently sitting on windowsills not getting enough natural light.

Currently the growhouse is full of lettuces, radishes, onions, spinach, leeks, chard, a few different kinds of brassicas, some hardy annual flowers and various other bits and pieces, most of which are ready to be planted out at the allotment which I’ll do over the next week.

That will then clear space in the house for another round of successional sowing for lettuces, radishes, turnips, beetroot, salad onions, spinach and peas.

In the garden

Last week the bulk order (1m cubed bag) of composted green waste arrived, but I was down with covid so not able to do anything with it. Yesterday I finally had the energy to make a start with spring mulching in the garden. I’m spreading an inch or two on all the soil (there isn’t much of it – it’s a tiny garden!) to feed the soil and in turn the plants, as part of a gradual effort to rejuvenate the soil.

I’ve also ordered some composted bark to add as a surface mulch to keep moisture in and deter cats from treating my little borders as a giant litter tray….

The hot composter is going great guns – it’s 50C in the middle at the moment, and full to the top. It keeps getting infested with flies, so I’ve added a layer of already rotted compost to the top and will leave it to settle for a few days. That normally works, so long as we don’t add any wet or green material over the next few days.

I re-potted 3 of my little acer trees (I adore acers) – 2 into bigger pots, one with fresh compost in the same pot. Acers don’t like to be in pots that are too big for their roots, so it’s important to re-pot them into just slightly larger pots so as not to upset them. I potted them with a mix of John Innes (for heart), biochar chunks (to hold moisture and nutrients) and peat-free organic compost (for nutrients and life).

I’ve taken the succulents and other tender plants out of the cold frame today and placed them in their homes around the garden. There’s no more frost forecast for London now, so this should be safe, but if there’s a snap frost I can always bring them inside for a night.

The viburnum is still in flower, along with late daffs and the first tulips, hepatica and a single pale yellow wallflower I had forgotten about. The acers are coming into leaf visibly more each day, other deciduous shrubs are starting to come to life, ferns and a few herbaceous perennials are starting to unfurl.

The fences are still uncovered and ugly, and there’s not enough going on at head-height yet other than welcome climbers spilling over from next door. There are a couple of taller shrubs and small trees coming into leaf that will fill some of that gap over the summer, and I have a few tall annuals and tender perennials that will fill more of the space later in the year once they’re at full height.

I’m hoping the climbers I’ve planted against them will start to grow more vigorously this year. Some of them are clematis in their third year since planting, so if they follow the old adage ‘first year weep, second year creep, third year leap’ we should see a decent amount of growth this year.

Sowing seeds and planting bulbs

I’ve sown a few more seeds this week:

• calendula and cerinthe, to replace the seedlings that didn’t survive this week’s frosty nights in the grow house – these will go on the edges of allotment beds for pollinators, edible flowers (from the calendula) and lovely cut flowers (both)
• mini cucumbers to replace the ones destroyed by frosty nights in the growhouse
• black cumin
• turnips (sown on Tuesday, germinated by Saturday!)
• wasabi rocket – multi-sown, 3-4 seeds per module
• sweet genovese basil
• courgettes – I’m growing the yellow ones again as I love the colour and for some reason they seem to grow more happily on my plot than green ones
• calabrese
• cauliflowers (a mix of different types)
• persicaria orientalis – for summer foliage and height in the garden
• tomatoes (just a few as back-ups in case the ones I sowed too early get caught by cold or grow too tall during April)

My order of summer bulbs (ordered on a bit of an impulse when I realised Crocus had a sale on – it was a bit of a case of order now, worry about where to plant them later!) arrived this week, so they’re all now potted up.

I’m keeping the tender ones in the house until they start showing signs of growth, then they’ll go out to the cold frame to harden off before being planted out in May or June. The gladioli and ranunculus are relatively hardy so have gone straight in the soil at the allotment where they are to grow.

I’ve got:

• Crocosmia Columbus for the allotment cut flower patch (my dream, which I’m still quite a long way from achieving, is to be able to have cut flowers from the allotment or garden every month of the year)
• Caladium White Queen and Freida Hemple for vibrant red foilage in the garden
• Ranunculus Aviv Rose and Aviv Red for the allotment
• Colocasia Esculenta Black Magic for lovely dark summer foliage in the garden
• Gladiolus Green Star for the cut flower patch
• Iris English Cottage for the white border in the garden
• Convallaria Majalis Rosea

There are seedlings all over the place at the moment – in the house in propagators, on tables and windowsills; in the cold frame; in the grow house; and in the ground at the allotment. I love this time of year when anything seems possible, the days are getting longer and (generally) warmer and everything is getting greener and more full of life.

Monstera adventure

Also this week, I ordered and sowed some Monstera Deliciosa seeds – I spotted them in a seed catalogue, got over-excited and thought it would be fun to have a go at growing some of these lovely plants from seeds.

They can take up to 90 days to germinate, so this is going to be a long game. I love that aspect of gardening – in a world of instant gratification, I like the slow take-your-time laid back energy of something that takes 90 days to even get started.

Salad from the Veg Trug

The Veg Trug on the little parking space in front of our house is going great guns – we’ve had 3 lovely salads out of it so far; the winter salad leaves are coming to an end now and will shortly be replaced with some summer lettuces. Meanwhile the radishes, onions, chives, coriander, beetroot and radishes have all germinated.

It makes me ridiculously happy having fresh, vital, crunchy and tasty salad leaves from a planter filled with compost made out of our leftover food and garden waste <3.

On the allotment

I spent most of this week still recovering from a nasty bout of covid, so haven’t done a lot on the allotment. I’ve been up a few times to check on the seedlings and have a little potter, and whilst I’ve been there I’ve:

• weeded all the beds – I try and do a bit of weeding little and often, pulling out any weeds I can see, rather than letting weeds get out of control, which means I can go over the whole plot in 20 minutes (no dig helps with this a lot – you get hardly any annual weeds because you don’t disturb the soil and cause seeds to germinate and the mulch you add each year blocks out the light that might normally instigate germination)
• planted out a few lettuce and spinach seedlings – they were small, but I’m reliably informed by the one and only Charles Dowding that this is fine, and in fact better than waiting until they’re bigger (so far they seem to be fine, despite the frosty nights, so I’m beginning to think he may be on to something…)
• transplanted some self-sown parsnips from a single parsnip I let go to seed last year — I don’t know if you can do this / if they’re likely to survive, but I thought it was worth a shot as they can’t stay where they decided to grow – that’s for the brassicas this year. I’ve protected them with fleece to conserve warmth and moisture and give them a good shot at surviving – we’ll see what happens….