It’s been a sunny weekend so I’ve been out in the garden getting my plants in order. I’ve already talked about what I learned from my garden last year so now I’m starting to put that into practice.
Indoors
First, my little hot plants. I planted my tomatoes, chillis and peppers in my windowsill propagators back in January. Did I mention my windowsill propagators? I had them for Christmas. Quite frankly, eggboxes worked for me in 2020 and 2021 but my mum got excited and now I own the proper things. I have a seed tray with twenty-odd compartments and its own lid, and I have a set of three larger trays that sit together in a long tray, each with their own lid. In practice, ever since they’ve been on a south-facing windowsill, I’ve left the lids off because they get sweaty. On a north-facing windowsill, the waterproof trays just stayed wet and things got mouldy. On the south-facing one, the water does eventually dry out and it needs fresh water and that’s clearly healthier for them.
However, within about three weeks, my baby tomatoes had outgrown their little lids and so they’re now in pots – sharing three or four or even five to a pot – in a long tray to keep the windowsill dry. In fact, as of now, they’re regularly spending days outside hardening off. They should take two or three weeks before being put outside but as they’re going to a greenhouse, they probably don’t need quite that long. The peppers and chillis are still a bit too little. Once they’re big enough to come out of the propagators, they can spend a week hardening off too and then go into the greenhouses.
Yeah, greenhouses. Last year I invested in a plastic greenhouse. Earlier in the year, my parents were in B&Q and spotted similar greenhouses for about £16 and couldn’t resist bringing one home. It’s been in its box getting under everyone’s feet ever since but it’s now been put together and attached to the fence next to the old one and by the time you read this, it’ll have its own thermometer so I can monitor my babies and make sure they’re keeping warm enough at night.
As for the chillis and peppers, I have a ton of them. The first round didn’t do very well so I went for a second round. For the last two years, I’ve been very careful to always know what’s a chilli and what’s a pepper but when they eventually start producing fruit, it’s always been a surprise. I’ve had huge thin green things, big fat red things, pointy lime-green things, yellow things and I still don’t know which ones are chillis and which are peppers. This year I have four varieties and as they’re a surprise anyway, I’ve given up on tracking their kinds. They’re botanically the same anyway.
The vegetables & flowers
Today I’ve been planting my outdoor vegetables. Last year I did them much earlier and they sat for months doing nothing, so I’ve waited until spring seems fairly firmly on its way. I don’t expect them to be ready to harvest much, if any, later than last year. Now, there was a small complication. Two small complications.
Number one was that a couple of carrots, spring onions and red onions have appeared which clearly weren’t in the mood to grow last year. With everything else, I’ve dug out a couple of inches of the old soil, replaced it with fresh and sprinkled my seeds. But in those three containers, I haven’t been able to do that without disturbing the survivors. So there are new carrots around the two old ones, there are spring onions scattered around the old ones and I’ve embedded a load of red onion bulbs around my handful of 2021 red onions.
Number two was that I’m doing my Rebel Gardener badge. Mostly that means I have to spend the spring and summer gardening but there are a few requirements. I have to grow three flowering plants and three vegetables or fruits. Three from seed and three from bulb. I don’t do flowers and I don’t do bulbs. I like the seed and seedling stage. I like to feel like I’ve done the whole thing myself.
So now I have bulbs and flowers. My white onions, which were planted many weeks ago now, are bulbs – mostly at my dad’s insistence because last year’s onions have taken a year to start growing and he wanted onions to eat. I don’t think I can take a whole lot of credit for the onion bulbs, but I did plant them. At his strict instruction – draw a line with your finger here, put them in here, this way up etc, but it was me and now it’s spring, I’ll be the one mostly looking after them. Red onions are not really different except in colour but I did plant them all myself. I placed them randomly in the red onion container and then I filled an empty trough and placed them nicely in two rows in there. Third, I have some begonias. What exactly? Samba mixed! A nice mix of reddish, pinkish and yellowish begonias.
My other flowers are candy stripe cosmos, because they’re pretty (they’re also in the windowsill propagators for now) and butterfly attracting mixed annuals which have gone straight in a pot outside. That makes three flowers, three bulbs and a lot of things grown from seeds.
What else have I got? Well, I’ve got two troughs of radishes. One is French Breakfast, which are long and thin, and one is rainbow, which is a mix of colours ranging from white to purple via golden and red. I’ve got a container of parsnips, mostly because I want them to be ready for Christmas dinner. I’ve got leeks – they worked pretty well last year and although they were an absolute pig to haul out of the soil, I was always delighted to pull up a leek or two for dinner. Anything else? No, I think that’s everything I’ve planted today.
The herbs
I also have last year’s herbs, which went a bit grey and dead over winter but are reviving nicely now. The tarragon is even trying to stand up straight. I left it in my greenhouse a bit long last year. It shot up, hit the roof and then started to bend. I’ve put it in a new pot, since it was outgrowing last year’s and it should do well now. I’ve also raised up the lavender by putting its pot on a broken one. The herbs all just looked too closely crowded together and raising that one has given them all a lot more breathing room.
I planted my chives, parsley and rosemary a bit late last year but they’re finally starting to look quite good and I’m hoping they’ll run wild this year and make me proud. However, the basil is definitely dead and if I’m going to have basil this year, I’m going to have to get more seeds.
What else is coming up later in the year?
So that’s the state of my garden as of early April. I’ve got a few more things to plant.
- Beans
The beans will come later in the year – I tend to put them in around late May or June or even July and they’re very enthusiastic once they get started. I think they’re just green beans. Maybe broad beans? Maybe even runner beans? I don’t think they’re runner beans. Last year’s beans made red flowers but they didn’t work quite as well as the white-flowering beans of 2020, so I’m going back to white beans this year.
- Cucamelons
I loved the cucamelons! Ok, no one ate them but they were so much fun! I knew nothing about them going in but it turns out they climb and grab and they just went nuts. Not only that, they produced tons of fruit. They’re weird things – they look like miniature watermelons the length of my thumb but inside they’re sort of lemony-cucumber-acid-flavoured. I want more this year and I’m either going to harvest them and turn them into chutney or find someone who’ll eat them.
- Passion flowers
My sister bought a pair of passion flowers last year that turned out to be Chinese lanterns. This year I’ve got some seeds and they’re growing in my propagator. They’ve only resulted in two seedlings so far, so I don’t have a lot of hope, but the idea is that I’ll plant them out this summer and then next summer they’ll finally start producing magnificent flowers and maybe even some tiny passionfruits.
- Care and feeding
Right now, nothing really needs much attention. I’ll water everything and I’ll teach the hot stuff to get used to the outside so they’re all ready to go into the greenhouse. The actual work will come later. When they all get bigger, they’ll need to go into their junior pots and then their adult pots and then they’ll need feeding and harvesting but that’s all some months ahead.
And that’s it!
That’s my garden so far this year. It’s not the sort of outdoors content I ever thought I’d be writing but in the last two years, I’ve learned a lot about appreciating the outdoors – gardening, stargazing, sitting in the woods, swimming in the open-air pool, and I want to spread the joy of some of those things as well as the more obvious ones like hiking and camping. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you want to start growing your own veg and don’t know where to start, start with radishes. Sprinkle some seeds into whatever container you’ve got, stick them outside or on a windowsill and a month or so later, you’ll have your first harvest. Radishes are so easy and so fun and you’re going to see so much more of mine as the year goes by.