Showing posts with label snow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label snow. Show all posts

Sunday, January 24, 2010

snow time like the present

Hurrah! The snow has gone!!
As pretty as it looked, after only a few days it became a bit tiresome, not only preventing me getting to the office on a few days (during a very busy time) but also stopping me from really getting into the garden. But thankfully the blanket covering has vacated the suburban veg plot.
This weekend was a hive of activity - moreso in the kitchen than on the plot. Paper potting ahoy! All of my tomato, chilli and sweet pepper seeds have now been sown in little paper pots and the seeds trays placed on my lovely heated kitchen floor.


Feltham First peas have been sown - I'm experimenting with the guttering method this year rather than direct sown. I had my builder from last year leave me 2 pieces of guttering cut to 1m length (the width of my raised beds).


The idea is that once germinated and ready to plant out, I need only to dig a shallow trench and then slide out the contents of the guttering, pea plants and all! I now have them filled and covered with holly to keep off any hungry mice.



Lancashire lad purple podded peas along with Autumn Mammoth 2 leeks have also been sown - the former in loo roll tubes and latter in a 5'' pot. I'm hoping to do better with successional swing this year, so I have another leek variety to sow in a month's time. Last years leeks were started off slightly later than planned and so we've had the benefit of them only since November. They've been great as baby leeks though - brushed in olive oil and cooked on a griddle pan - mmmm. Will be nice to see what they're like fully grown this season!

Sunday, December 20, 2009

The best laid plans...

Plan A this week was to fly to Amsterdam for a pre-Christmas break. Amsterdam is so lovely in the winter - twinkly lights over canal bridges and cosy cafes serving hot chocolate and spiced biscuits. But Jack Frost put paid to that plan on Friday by closing Luton Airport. So Plan B was to sow overwintering peas - Feltham First - which I received as part of a seed swap in November. It didn't take long to realise that 5 inches of snow on the raised beds isn't conducive to seed sowing. We then considered making leek and potato soup to cheer ourselves up before concluding that we'd need a flamethrower to get a leek out of the ground. So I then consoled myself by organising my seed box into chronological order of sowing times. And that all starts in a few weeks' time!

Now that the house work is all but finished, I've realised that a secondary advantage of the underfloor heating in the kitchen is that I now have the world's biggest heated propagator. Come January I'll be lining up my seed trays on the floor to give those tomatoes a head start. We've made a start on this years' green tomato chutney so will definitely be needing to replenish that come the autumn.