We sowed some courgettes earlier on in the year which are currently growing away in the polytunnel in the hope of getting an earlier crop. We even have our first flower! Although as predicted, the first flower to open is a female flower (the flowers that bear the courgettes), but there is no male flower... Continue Reading →
Planting out our trial brassicas
Hopefully you've been finding our "trial brassica" journey interesting and helpful so far. And this is where it really begins - the planting out! Before planting out, we gave each plant the usual treatment - a good soak in some diluted Maxicrop seaweed. We find that this gives the plants a good start when they're... Continue Reading →
Potting up our peppers
It's that time of year where everything is growing really fast. Despite commenting in our previous blog posts about how slowwww peppers are to grow (which I still stand by overall!), they have really got a wiggle on the past couple of weeks and were ready to pot on. Although it's often tempting, you should try... Continue Reading →
Container carrots
Given the current circumstances, lots of people seem to be trying their hand at "grow your own", and why not - it's great fun (in our view!) And this post is dedicated to showing that you don't have to have a big garden to be able to grow vegetables. In fact, you don't really need... Continue Reading →
Outdoor cucumbers
We grew a couple of cucumbers outdoors last year successfully, growing up a batten fixed diagonally to our garden fence, so we wanted to try this again. Therefore, we sowed our cucumbers in a 1/4 seed tray in seed and modular compost. We sowed the seeds on their sides the best we could, gently pushing... Continue Reading →
End of April update
We thought it might be interesting to give you an update on some of the crops we've already planted out. This time round: lettuce, beetroot and courgettes! We planted these out 10 days ago - and they've grown loads already! They've been in the polytunnel as Dad has kindly given up part of the path... Continue Reading →
A hot and spicy(!) update
We thought it would be good to give you an update on our peppers, almost three months after they were sown. So here they are: Dad has given us up some space in his cold greenhouse to keep them, and we have been watering them since we pricked them out into these pots and watching... 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 →
Early cropping container courgettes
We would usually sow our courgettes around the third week in April. This means that by the time they are ready to plant out, the chance of a frost is reduced where we live, therefore giving them the best start to their growing lives. Given the lockdown we're currently under, we thought we'd sow a... Continue Reading →
