February Sowings

I've always heard about how women love to shop and how they love a bargain. Well true to form, my partner has been out bargain hunting! I should really have known what was going to happen when she moved in with 400 pairs of shoes and 80 handbags. Yes, really, she does have that many pairs of shoes and handbags!

She pops in all sorts of shops when she's at work and found some seed potatoes, onion sets and shallots in the pound shop. She bought some. They were a bargain at only �1. Apparently!  I'm not complaining though, I think it's great!! There weren't many seed potatoes in each bag - only 8 in the first and 10 in the second - but about 50 onions in each bag. That means the onions are half the price they are in the normal garden centres.

Anyway, today was the day we finally got round to sowing loads of stuff - not just the cheapy stuff she found in the pound shop, but other seeds we had and other seed potatoes and onion sets we'd bought. We've had a couple of cold weeks, snow that lasted a week or so, and now it's quite mild again and the weather forecast is looking good for the next few days.

Potatoes - Swift - 1st Early
These were the pound shop seed potatoes. There were only 8 in the pack and all were sprouting, so we put them in buckets for the patio. 4 inches of compost in the bottom of the bucket, spud on top (sprouts pointing upwards), then cover with more compost. Keep topping up as the leaves grow and come through until the buckets are full.

We have loads more seed potatoes - 2nd Earlies from the pound shop, and King Edward and ?? from the garden centre. We'll probably plant the 2nd Earlies in sacks of compost, and the King Edwards will go in the potato bed in the veggie patch.

Elephant Garlic
Hands up if you've been given an elephant garlic bulb as a Christmas present! We did!! We used a couple of cloves in cooking and decided to plant the rest. So 6 cloves into 6 inch pots of compost.

Garlic needs frost / cold weather to encourage it to split into cloves, so this might be the wrong time to plant it. It might need to stay in pots until summer next year. We'll have to wait and see.

Carrots
Another 3 troughs. 1 each of Nantes Frubund, Early Nantes and Rainbow. The rainbow carrots said to sow from March, but it's quite mild weather and we'll be keeping the troughs in the greenhouse for a few weeks, so decided to take a chance on sowing them now.

Cauliflower
Back in the autumn we found Romanesco cauliflower in Surrey Street Market in Croydon. And then we found the seeds in the garden centre, so we just had to have some! It kind of looks like something from another planet - it's green and spikey, but it's definitely cauliflower and tastes like normal cauliflower. And while we were in the garden centre, we found Purple Grafitti Cauliflower seeds - this looks the same as normal cauliflower, but it's purple.

We sowed 4 Romanesco, 4 Purple Grafitti, 16 All Year Round. We love cauliflower, so we'll be sowing more in a couple of months.

Broccoli
We love broccoli too. There are enough varieties (broccoli and calabrese) to ensure we can pick broccoli all year round, and we have several varieties of seeds here. We already have 15 Summer Purple growing in the greenhouse, so today we sowed:
16 Green Magic
8 Summer Purple
We'll be sowing more in a couple of months.

Tomatoes
We want literally as many tomatoes as we can grow. If we don't eat them in salads and sandwiches, we can cook them or freeze them for later. We are going to need LOADS of big pots! So the list of todays sowings is:

24 Moneymaker
4 Belle (Beef tomato)
1 Shirley (as it was the only one left in the packet)
19 Pomodoro
4 Tumbling Tom (Cherry) for growing from hanging baskets
4 Sungold (Cherry)
16 Gardeners Delight (Cherry)

Chillies & Peppers
We love chillies and peppers too, so need to grow loads of these. The sweet pepper seeds we sowed last month did nothing, and I don't normally have much luck with chillies, so hoping for better results with these. Today we sowed:
Chilli (Cayenne)
Chilli (Hot Stuff)
Chilli (Twilight)
Pepper (Caribbean Blend)
Sweet Pepper (Worldbeater)

Cucumber
Had trouble finding greenhouse cucumbers this year. Only found one variety called Bangkok. The packet says 5 seeds per pack - we got lucky, we got 6! OK, so we're not going to need loads and loads of seeds, but it still seems a bit tight of the seed companies to only put 5 (or 6) seeds in a pack. Anyway, we sowed 4 today, wait and see what happens ....

Celery
Never had much luck with celery before, but love it, so trying again this year. 4 Lathoms Galaxy sown. Will do more later. Must find out the best ways to grow it.

Spinach
Baby spinach leaves are always good in salads, and bigger leaves are good in a curry etc. I've always managed to grow spinach just fine, so sowed:
8 Hector
8 Picasso
I'll sow some spinach beet this year too and hopefully find a permanent home for it.

Onions
The other half found Stetton and Stuttgarter onions in the pound shop - approx 50 per bag. We picked up 100 Red Baron and 100 Stuttgarter Giant from the garden centre too.
Packs often have a few more than they say, but some are dried up or rotten, so it's always just approximate. We planted:
100 Red Baron
50 Stuttgarter (from pound shop)
10 Stuttgarter (from garden centre)
all in 2in pots to give them a head start against the weeds in the onion bed. We'll start the other onions in a couple of weeks time.

And Then ....
.... it was time for a well earned cuppa. We've got loads more sowing and planting to do, and loads of other garden jobs to do. It's going to be a very busy year!