Showing posts with label seedlings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seedlings. Show all posts

Monday, 26 February 2007

Raiding the Divine Archive

So who does remember Be Bop Deluxe anyway? One of my erstwhile favourites and completely out of place in this blog entry except...

onions2004
this picture of onions has been raided from the archives because I can't take any pictures of the seedlings to illustrate this post.

Nearly all the seeds I planted are now up and a few, the basil primarily, have succumbed to damping off fungal infection, but mostly they're doing o.k. I have pricked out the tomatoes and quite a lot of the onions. By the way, there's no real need to start onions in January unless you're hoping for show winners. Some of the household feel that a small onion is an inadequate onion but the cook, that's me mostly, has no problem with the smaller bulbs and they often keep better too. So start your onions in March or plant sets in April. They'll be fine.

As usual the problem facing me is where to put all these burgeoning shreds of new life. Space indoors is extremely limited and the greenhouses are in need of thorough cleaning and sorting out. Suppose I'll just have to get on with it.

The roots planted are also up. I wish I could show you the eddoes which have done incredibly well and the crosnes are also up and have been moved to the greenhouse already. There are also some Babington Leek babies from a head of bulbils I discovered while clearing out a corner and a pot of Seville orange pips from marmalade making are now up and raring to go.

All great stuff. Really. It's just that I don't know when I'm going to France, how I'll get everything there or how to overcome feeling hopeless about it all.

And I still have to get to Ireland and sort out the Irish house sale.

Tuesday, 30 January 2007

Seedy

Planted some seeds yesterday. Not really for France but for the greenhouses in NP.

So far, I've put in some 'Lemon Drop' and 'Dedo de Mocha' chilis, some small leaved basil, tomatoes 'Salt Spring Sunrise' and 'Scotland yellow', 'Mammoth' onion seed, aubergine 'Szechuan' and some mixed abutilons. They are in a heated propagator and I take a peek every time I pass by.

We have quantities of seeds and each year I swear I won't buy any more for a year so that the older ones get used up but I'm a sucker for interesting varieties and there are so many places that supply fascinating seeds that I can't stop myself.

This year I have already ordered and received seeds from Realseeds who are great for chilis and south american crops like amaranth, the HDRA heritage seed library and have plans to get caper seeds from Chiltern Seeds, not to mention nipping into Lidl for their incredibly cheap seed packets of regular essentials like carrots and annual herbs. Another great seed supplier is Tuckers and I may be buying some more pumpkin seeds from Chase Organics since they are stocking a new favourite of mine Cucurbita Moschata 'Muscade' a really productive green/bronze squash with really thick orange flesh, almost sweet enough to eat raw that stores well. The only problem is that each fruit is much too big for two people and we nearly always end up wasting half of each one.

moschata