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.
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 the natural process required for the seed to germinate. In the case of lettuces, this requires the seed to be chilled before it is left to germinate (hence the title of this blog post!)
To achieve this, we leave our lettuce seed in the fridge all the time. That means that they’re chilled whenever we want to sow them!
When we’re ready, we prepare a quarter seed tray. I know we’ve been through this before, but in case you’re a new reader (or just as a reminder!) that means filling the tray loosely with Seed and Modular compost, gently compressing this and then lightly watering with a fine rose watering can.
Then we scatter as many lettuce seeds as we want to grow in a quarter seed tray and cover with vermiculite. This time round, it was Little Gem.
We then place the seed trays under the bench and cover with a piece of glass and a couple of sheets of newspaper. This is to stop the light getting to the seeds whilst they’re trying to germinate.
These were sown last Monday, and by today they were ready to prick out! This is the seedlings after they’ve been pricked out into cell trays. They will stay in these cells until they’re ready to be planted out, which will probably be in a couple of weeks.
We are both quite into our food. Any excuse and we spend hours rustling up something for dinner. One of our favourite easy starters/meals is antipasti. And then last year, we discovered Padrons! They are best fried in a little oil until they blister and then sprinkled with some sea salt – delicious!!
So this year, we wanted to grow our own. What could taste better than one of our favourite foods, but homegrown?!
Like with most of the seeds we sow, they were sown in slightly moistened and gently compressed Seed and Modular compost and then covered with vermiculite. The peppers need a bit of heat to germinate, so they were popped on the propagator until they started poking their heads out.
Peppers take slightly longer to germinate than some of the other seeds we’ve been growing. Sometimes up to 2-3 weeks, so patience is a virtue!
Once they were large enough to handle, we pricked them out into 3″ pots in multipurpose compost. They should stay in these pots until they are planted out in a few weeks’ time.
Not only are peppers quite slow to germinate, but they generally grow much more slowly than most other vegetables we’re used to growing. Therefore, you just have to be patient, as it can be several months from sowing until you see any signs of a pepper. But it’s all worth it in the end!
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.
The sowing season is now very much upon us, and this weekend we sowed our Machu Picchu Chilli Pepper seeds.
It was a very simple process, and didn’t involve anything out of the ordinary!
First of all we filled the seed tray with seed and modular compost (which is much finer than regular compost, therefore ideal for sowing).
Our next step was to use a block of wood to flatten out/compress the compost…
Then, we carefully placed the seeds on top of the compost, an equal distance apart – and pressed them down a little.
Once they’d been pressed down, the seed tray was covered with vermiculite, as shown below…
It’ll now go onto the propagator until the seeds are showing – which will be roughly 2 weeks (hopefully!).
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In other news, we had a little check on our early new potatoes, and whilst we had to move out a little soil before we could find them – they’re certainly not far away from showing!
After a slow start and us questioning whether any would ever appear, we ended up with far too many cucamelons! Having never grown them before, we weren’t sure what to do with them – but our Instagram followers came to our rescue! Apparently pickled cucamelon is very popular both here and in the US!
And it couldn’t be easier to make…
Firstly, we mixed 300ml of white vinegar with a teaspoon of salt, stirring until it was dissolved. Then we added a tablespoon of demerara sugar, again stirring until dissolved.
We chopped some mint and dill from the herb garden and added these to the solution along with some coriander seeds, before washing the cucamelons and adding them to sterilised jars.
The pickling solution was then poured over the cucamelons and the jars were sealed tightly, ready for the cucamelons to pickle away!
It was time to harvest the red onions we had been growing in a pot last week. Although they hadn’t grown particularly big, their leaves had fallen to one side and they were no longer putting up new centre leaf growth so they were as big as they were going to get!
Therefore, we gently pulled the onions from the pot and have hung them on the shed to dry. Hopefully this will enable us to store them through the winter for eating (if they last that long!)
