We're getting ready to re-plant the herb garden for 2020. And this post focuses on the mint. Although mint is a perennial plant, we find that it grows with more vigour if you take cuttings each year and re-grow it. We have three types of mint: ordinary garden mint, apple mint and black peppermint. First,... Continue Reading →
Trialling the brassica seeds
Different seeds have different shelf lives, with the shelf life typically decreasing once the sealed packet has been opened. But we always think it's a shame to just throw the remainder of a packet of seed from one year away the following year if you didn't finish it. Therefore, early on in the season we... Continue Reading →
Some early cropping salad too!
As well as our container courgettes, we thought we would start off some salad crops indoors. For now, we've sown some Little Gem and Iceberg lettuces and some Boston beetroot. The lettuces were initially sown in quarter seed trays, like most of our seeds, and then pricked out into these small cell trays (about 1 inch diameter). The... Continue Reading →
Tidying up after last year: our strawberry story
Last weekend, I did a bit of tidying of the strawberry bed. We're hoping for a slightly more successful season with the strawberries this year. There were two main reasons we think we didn't get many strawberries last year: We only bought the bare route runners quite late on in the Spring, which meant they... Continue Reading →
Potty about potatoes
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.
Lettuce (let us) chill
Lettuces can be a funny one to try and germinate, albeit one of the easiest to grow once you've got them beyond this point. Therefore, we thought we'd given a step-by-step guide to how we sow our lettuces to get them germinated. Most seeds require stratification before they will germinate. This is a process which imitates... Continue Reading →
Pricking out the chilli peppers and colourful cauliflowers
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... Continue Reading →
Courgettes: – Practising what we preach
We revealed our top tip for courgette-success in one of our previous posts, which is staking the plants and regularly tying the stalk to it. This results in the courgette plant taking up less space and also being much easier to harvest! As you can see (albeit I appreciate I'm only 5' 2") the courgette... Continue Reading →
