My first year dabbling with veg growing (part 2)

This is the second part of this post, please see the first part here.

I scrabbled around in our garage which had become a dumping ground for (amongst other things) all the plants pots we have ever acquired without their deceased occupants. I found a few pots and in went the rocket and lettuce seeds.

Around this time I also brought a root trainer seed tray that I thought would be good for growing tomatoes from seed. It allows you to kind of split the pot and peak inside to see how the root system is coming along, also handy when potting up. Tomato seed went into this located at the kitchen window and before I new it I had 7 baby tomato plants.

I brought 3 potato planter bags for my seed potatoes, started reading up on what 'chitting' was (it basically means to allow the potatoes to grow sprouts before planting). Fortunately I didn't have to encourage the seed potatoes I had brought, they came with plenty of sprouts already. So I carefully unravelled the potatoes and sprouts and planted them in the potato bags with general purpose peat free compost.

Before long I was out in the garden every weekend finding things to do. Whether it was adding more compost to the potato bags, potting up tomato plants, watering and fertilising or harvesting spinach, rocket and lettuce I realised I must be enjoying it.

The kids were still not that interested so I appealed to their way of thinking by encouraging them to get their hands dirty by helping me pot up the tomato plants. This only really gained interest with my daughter who loves tomatoes.

Tomato plants were certainly one of the most successful attempts of last year. Eventually I put 6 of them into grow bags up against the south facing wall of the house and knocked nails into the wall to support them. This is when I realised that I will be trying bush tomatoes next time, cordons really are a flimsy lot and need a loads of support. Unfortunately the tomato crop never really matured on the plants, it seems the weather wasn't warm enough. So for a while my kitchen window sill and airing cupboard were full of ripening fruit.

Growing your own food is really feast of famine. One minute you are all excited because you have loads of something on had, be it potatoes, spinach, spring onions or tomatoes, the next you are just encouraging seedlings to germinate.

2011 will hopefully be a little bit better planned than last year but I am hopefully going to get a new patio built. This will be a dark colour, which will hopefully catch more heat and allow me to grow things a bit faster or grow some things that I wouldn't normally get away with in Northern Ireland.

Sowing the seeds of grub

Yesterday I managed to engage both of my kids in a bit of seed sowing by ignoring them.

My eldest helped me to sow some beetroot, radish, spring onion (called Scallions in NI) and spinach in a planter I made last year from a left over pallet. I wasn't going to ask him to help, but he saw me going outside with gloves on and asked if he could join in. It seems that they pay more interest if you don't try and engage their enthusiasm as when my daughter saw us we both got shouted at for not involving her in the process. Fortunately I had some bush tomato seeds to sow indoors, and she loves tomatoes more than pretty much anything so I got back in her good books by letting her sow them.

This year I have chosen to grow bush tomatoes because the cordon plants we tried last year grew well and produced a lot of fruit, but mostly didn't ripen before the bad weather set in. We eventually had a lot of green tomatoes sitting on the window sill (however the missus did make some lovely home made tomato soup from them eventually). I am hoping with the bush tomatoes we will start to get fruit earlier and hope for a constant stream for my daughter to enjoy a running buffet.