Last weekend I had a tidy up in the garden and found that I had a load of seeds on last years rocket that had bolted (flowered).
I cut off all the stems and brought them inside to have a look. I was able to get maybe 40 seeds that looked like they were in good condition from the seed pods. I have compared the look of these seeds to that of the few I have left over from the last sow and they look exactly the same.
I read somewhere that rocket seeds need to be two months old before they will germinate. I wonder does this mean from the time of picking, or from the time they have finished developing in the seed pod, or when? I have put the seeds in a piece of kitchen paper and left them in the kitchen to dry out for the time being.
Thursday 24 February 2011
Sunday 20 February 2011
My first year dabbling with veg growing (part 1)
Last year I decided that I would get started growing a few vegetables. I hadn't really grown anything of substance. I had a few Bonsai trees I was younger and of course the obligatory Venus Fly trap none of which lasted too long.
Now that I am blessed with 2 healthy kids I am of course concerned they remain healthy and growing a few vegetables in some pots seemed like something I could manage. To say my son is not interested in eating vegetables is an understatement but fortunately my daughter loves most vegetables and adores Tomatoes. So if I can get the kids in the garden and interested in getting their hands dirty, maybe I can convince my son to eat the fruits of his (dirty handed) labour.
When we moved into our house about 3 years ago the garden was lovely due the hard work of the previous owner and I must admit that I let it go rather a bit. This was partly due to avoiding the work and partly due to ignorance. I now had a fair sized problem with running bamboo in the area where I thought I could grow some veg. I started to dig out the bamboo but it was hard going because the bamboo had entwined itself with the heavy duty ground covering and I realised it wasn't going to be practical to grow the veg in that area that season.
I thought that maybe growing veg in pots was a good idea because I can move them around the garden while I am straightening out the mess it had become. I started looking at the cost of garden pots and realised that in general they are not cheap and I felt that kind of goes against the idea of growing your own vegetables. We had a few pots that were sitting around waiting to have something happen to them, but they didn't seem quite big enough. I thought about making my own, I had a wooden pallet waiting to go to the dump. Dusting off my (almost non-existent) woodworking skills I threw together a rectangular wooden pot that was about 30cm (12 inches) deep (as per advice found on Google for DIY veg pots),20cm (8 inches) wide and about 120cm (4 feet) long. Great a free wooden pot, except it would rot fairly quickly with soil in it, so I looked around for a veg plant friendly wood paint. I settled on Cuprinol Heritage Garden Shades.
I had a compost bin in the garden since just after I moved in and had been firing in all sorts of kitchen vegetable waste with plenty of "brown" compost-able waste. It was time to see what nature had made with it. On inspection it wasn't quite what I had hoped, it seems I should have maybe used slightly smaller twigs and crunched up the egg shells and cut up the wine corks. Still I wasn't going to waste this free compost. I chucked that in the bottom of my new pot and topped up with some shop (probably B&Q) brought compost. Googled for easy starter veg and decided on planting shop brought seeds of spinach, scallions (spring onions) and beetroot (I like beetroot but dislike scallions, my missus is the reverse).
With the minimum amount of care, up came the seedlings. Great I thought, I can't wait until I can eat them (well, not the scallions). I read up on some more on easily grown veg, found that you can get quite a few carrots to grow in a pots the size I had sat idle (about 30x30cm, 12x12 inches). So I brought some seed trays and made my first mistake which was to plant the carrots in seed trays. Carrots happily grow in seed trays, but they try to grow deep, quickly. Someone pointed this out to me so I sowed more carrot seeds directly into the other idle pot. When I moved the seedlings from the seed tray into the pots their roots had long since hit the bottom of the seed tray and turned or twisted. The plants seemed fine and indeed they were fine, until I they got big enough, old enough to pull. There was nothing wrong with the taste of these carrots, it was just their hilarious shapes. When you are used to seeing the carrots in your local supermarket all straight and uniform, you cant help smirking when you have double, even treble pronged carrots.
The spinach was the first to be ready for testing, now it is probably a just a trick of the mind, but that first bacon and spinach sandwich (sounded like an odd combination to me as well, but don't knock it until you have tried it) was absolutely heavenly.
After this success I was back out to the shops to get seed potatoes and rocket and lettuce seeds.
Now that I am blessed with 2 healthy kids I am of course concerned they remain healthy and growing a few vegetables in some pots seemed like something I could manage. To say my son is not interested in eating vegetables is an understatement but fortunately my daughter loves most vegetables and adores Tomatoes. So if I can get the kids in the garden and interested in getting their hands dirty, maybe I can convince my son to eat the fruits of his (dirty handed) labour.
When we moved into our house about 3 years ago the garden was lovely due the hard work of the previous owner and I must admit that I let it go rather a bit. This was partly due to avoiding the work and partly due to ignorance. I now had a fair sized problem with running bamboo in the area where I thought I could grow some veg. I started to dig out the bamboo but it was hard going because the bamboo had entwined itself with the heavy duty ground covering and I realised it wasn't going to be practical to grow the veg in that area that season.
I thought that maybe growing veg in pots was a good idea because I can move them around the garden while I am straightening out the mess it had become. I started looking at the cost of garden pots and realised that in general they are not cheap and I felt that kind of goes against the idea of growing your own vegetables. We had a few pots that were sitting around waiting to have something happen to them, but they didn't seem quite big enough. I thought about making my own, I had a wooden pallet waiting to go to the dump. Dusting off my (almost non-existent) woodworking skills I threw together a rectangular wooden pot that was about 30cm (12 inches) deep (as per advice found on Google for DIY veg pots),20cm (8 inches) wide and about 120cm (4 feet) long. Great a free wooden pot, except it would rot fairly quickly with soil in it, so I looked around for a veg plant friendly wood paint. I settled on Cuprinol Heritage Garden Shades.
I had a compost bin in the garden since just after I moved in and had been firing in all sorts of kitchen vegetable waste with plenty of "brown" compost-able waste. It was time to see what nature had made with it. On inspection it wasn't quite what I had hoped, it seems I should have maybe used slightly smaller twigs and crunched up the egg shells and cut up the wine corks. Still I wasn't going to waste this free compost. I chucked that in the bottom of my new pot and topped up with some shop (probably B&Q) brought compost. Googled for easy starter veg and decided on planting shop brought seeds of spinach, scallions (spring onions) and beetroot (I like beetroot but dislike scallions, my missus is the reverse).
With the minimum amount of care, up came the seedlings. Great I thought, I can't wait until I can eat them (well, not the scallions). I read up on some more on easily grown veg, found that you can get quite a few carrots to grow in a pots the size I had sat idle (about 30x30cm, 12x12 inches). So I brought some seed trays and made my first mistake which was to plant the carrots in seed trays. Carrots happily grow in seed trays, but they try to grow deep, quickly. Someone pointed this out to me so I sowed more carrot seeds directly into the other idle pot. When I moved the seedlings from the seed tray into the pots their roots had long since hit the bottom of the seed tray and turned or twisted. The plants seemed fine and indeed they were fine, until I they got big enough, old enough to pull. There was nothing wrong with the taste of these carrots, it was just their hilarious shapes. When you are used to seeing the carrots in your local supermarket all straight and uniform, you cant help smirking when you have double, even treble pronged carrots.
The spinach was the first to be ready for testing, now it is probably a just a trick of the mind, but that first bacon and spinach sandwich (sounded like an odd combination to me as well, but don't knock it until you have tried it) was absolutely heavenly.
After this success I was back out to the shops to get seed potatoes and rocket and lettuce seeds.
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