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!
