Its very early, I know, but I’ve taken a chance on planting a few seeds. I’m hoping for a head start and that we wont have to cold a Spring this year.
The tomatoes I grew last year were really good and I’m hoping for more this year. I’ve also got some different varieties to try this year.
I’m using these great little peat pellet propagators thingys, a top bargain in fact as I picked them up in Poundland, even better they were reduced to 50p! You just water the little discs of peat and they swell into small seed carriers.
You pop your seeds in and then place the propagator somewhere warm and wait for the seeds to germinate. With Toms and Cumbers you want to keep them good and warm so I’m starting off in the airing cuboard for a few day. When they grow, I’ll be able to pot them on in the pellet as the outer sack breaks down. Yay, no more broken seedlings while trying to plant them out 🙂
I put them in yesterday and they are now in the airing cupboard and we’ll see if they germinate. I’ve put in 2 Moneymaker Tomato, 1 Cherry Plum Tomato, 1 Tumbling Tom and 2 Cucumbers. This year I’m all about the succesional sowing so I’ve just put a few in and I’ll do more in a couple of weeks. I hope the Cherry Plums germinate, I actually harvested the seed from a supermarket Tomato following the instructions here.
The Tumbling Tom is a hanging basket variety and I’m really looking forward to seeing how that looks/works. I’ve not done cucumbers before so that will be interesting, wonder how they’ll do?
I also did a layer of mixed mustard and cress. I’d saved a punnet from some shop bought cress and used that. When I looked this morning, most of the seed had already germinated, how quick is that? I’m really pleased with this especially as the mustard seeds are ones I dried myself last year, I let a batch go to seed and got about a million seeds. I know! Like, for free 🙂
Oh, and I got some seed potatoes too, I have to do something called chitting before I can do anything with them though. I’m planning to do 2 early potatoe plants started of inside and then grown on in big pots, one to a pot. That will good if it works.
I’m going to get one of those small plastic greenhouses this year too, I’ve just got to convince Paul about where I want to put it!