Proof that vegetable growing can be done by anybody. From a couple of under 30s – one who grew up growing and one who has just got going…
Our main sowing of potatoes, Cara and Carolus are starting to show now!
We’re still being careful to look out for when it’s due to be frosty. Initially, we covered the first few leaves with a flowerpot to protect them. Now they’re a bit bigger, we would throw some fleece over the top.
Our chard was ready to plant out last weekend.
We found a little spot down the garden that we could squeeze it, so levelled the soil out and got ready to plant.
Before we planted the chard out, we gave them the “seaweed treatment”. This involves mixing up some Maxicrop Triple seaweed with water in a bucket and then submerging each plant for a minute or so until the plant has taken up some of the seaweed mixture.
When you first submerge the plant, air bubbles will come up from the pot, so you know that there’s room for some more seaweed to be taken up. When these bubbles start to slow down or stop, you’re done!
We then planted each chard about 6 inches apart. We’ve been reading up on it, and you can plant chard up to 1 foot apart. But we are going to settle with “mini leaves” to see how we get on.
We only had space for 10 out of the 11 plants, so the final one has been planted out into a 10 litre pot. We’ll see how this one does in comparison.
We also wanted to try growing sweetcorn this year. Firstly, we wanted to grow the coloured sweetcorn, but turned out this is only ornamental, and we’re all about things we can eat, so traditional yellow sweetcorn it was!
We decided on a variety called Earliking, which was supposed to be a really sweet variety. So we thought we’d give them a try. We sowed one seed in cell trays that were about 1″ x 2″. Sweetcorn seeds are an interesting one. They are one of the biggest seeds we’ve probably seen, and also are exactly like the dried up corns we know and love.
We sowed these on the Easter weekend, and they were ready to plant out today.
We planted them 6-8″ apart in a square. We added our few plants to the square Dad had already started to give them the best chance.
It’s important to plant sweetcorn in a square to try and ensure you get sweetcorns! This is because in order to produce the sweetcorn cobs, the plants need to be pollinated. This is achieved when the “tassels” appear, which need to sway in the wind and pollinate one another. Without this, no sweetcorn cobs will be produced. As you can’t guarantee which way the wind will blow when the pollination needs to happen, planting out in a square block is the safest.
After planting, we watered the plants in to settle the soil around them.
We haven’t had a chance to write a post for a couple of weeks, but there’s been lots going in!
Potatoes
These were planted in late January, but have been kept indoors as we are still getting a few sharp frosts here in Essex.
Firstly, they were growing in the lean to greenhouse with a little heat, but now they’ve been moved to the polytunnel. The first photo was two weeks ago, and the second today. It’s amazing how much they’ve grown! We’ve also put some cane supports in for each one now, as their haulms were getting a bit unruly. And we didn’t want them to break off!
Kohl rabi
We sowed our Purple Delicacy kohl rabi last week. These were sown into Seed and Modular compost in a quarter seed tray and covered with vermiculite. As kohl rabi is part of the brassica family, and therefore quite a hardy plant, they didn’t need to be germinated on the propagator. Instead, we covered them with a sheet of glass and some newspaper.
They had already germinated by this weekend!
So we pricked them out into 3″ pots into multipurpose compost.
Just a week after sowing, the Machu Picchu, Navona and Graffiti were ready to prick out. Unfortunately, we haven’t got round to writing this post until now though, so they’ve moved on a bit from now (see updated photos at the bottom of the post!)
The cauliflowers were pricked out into 3 inch pots which we filled with multipurpose compost, and the peppers were pricked out into cell trays (60 cells per seed tray), filled with seed and modular compost.
We use different composts depending on the size of the pot/cell tray that we are pricking out into. Multipurpose compost can sometimes be coarser than the seed and modular compost, and therefore the finer compost works better in the smaller cell trays.
Seedlings are usually pricked out when they have grown their first two true leaves. Therefore, they are big enough to handle, but still quite small and delicate in the whole scheme of things.
We prick the seedlings out with a dibber, being careful not to disturb or break off any of the roots that the seedling has produced where possible. The dibber is dug in the compost a little way away from the seedling, and then underneath where the roots are likely to be to achieve this. The seedlings are then handled only by their leaves (not their stems) and pricked out into the pot/cell tray.
As you can see, the seedlings produce quite a root even after a week!
And this is the finished product! Always making sure to label the plants up as you go along so they don’t get muddled up.
And as we didn’t manage to write this post for a couple of weeks. This is how the cauliflowers look now…! They will stay in these pots until they’re planted out now, but we’ll keep you updated.
This year we wanted to try Romanesco cauliflowers. We bought a lovely bright green variety, Navona which caught our eye, as well as Graffiti, a purple cauliflower! The seed packets recommend they are grown as autumn harvesting varieties, which would mean sowing in April/May.
However, we couldn’t wait to give them a try, so we sowed a couple of each today. All being well, we should be looking to harvest these at some point in mid-late May.
All our seeds get sown in a very similar way. The seed tray is filled with Seed and Modular compost, watered with a fine rose watering can and then gently compressed to make a smooth seedbed.
The seeds are then carefully spaced around the seed tray to make sure they are easier to handle when it comes to pricking out.
We then cover the seeds with a fine layer of vermiculite and make sure that the seeds are named so we don’t get them confused!
As brassicas are quite hardy, their seeds don’t need bottom heat to germinate, even at this time of the year. Therefore, the finished seed tray was placed under a sheet of glass with newspaper over the top, and will be left until the seedlings start to show through. This shouldn’t take too long – probably about a week.
In the meantime, the seed tray may be moistened with a fine spray of water if it appears to be drying out.
Next up was the garlic which we bought from the garden centre a couple of weeks ago. Although it didn’t look like it, this was starting to shoot. The variety is Cristo.
First, we peeled the dry outer skins from the garlic and separated each of the cloves, making sure they were all firm.
Next, we filled a cell tray with multipurpose compost, making sure to firm this down as we filled it. We then moistened this with water from a fine rose can.
A garlic clove was then pushed into each cell, until it was about half submerged in the compost.
As you can hopefully see from the photo, some of the garlic cloves have already started to sprout, but we hope that the rest will start doing the same before long!
We’ll keep you posted!
There are an increasing number of great varieties of courgettes these days that are bred specifically to be grown in containers. Some examples are Parador (which is also a lovely yellow variety of courgette), Patio Star and Midnight.
Last weekend, I planted a Patio Star and a Midnight in 30 litre pots. We’ve grown these varieties for a number of years now and they are both fantastic croppers and very tasty to eat – which is key!
With anything we plant in containers, we always put some soil in the bottom to give the pots a bit of weight and keep them anchored if the wind creeps up.
We then filled each container with multipurpose compost before planting one courgette per pot.
We then put a stake in each pot for the courgette to grow up, securing this to the fence so that the plants can’t blow over once they get courgettes growing on them. As you can imagine, the plants get quite heavy once fruiting, so its important to make sure they’re tied up the stake at regular intervals to prevent the plant falling over. The ones we grew up stakes last year grew taller than me, so let’s hope for some of the same from this year’s plants!
