Let It Grow

Tomato seedlings of a "tall bush" variety. Not so tall or bushy yet.

And we're off! The sowing season is upon us. March is well and truly here and all growers everywhere are swiftly moving up a gear or two.

Seeds I ordered over winter from Real Seeds and Tamar Organics and stashed in cupboards are now being rudely awakened. I am digging out my plastic sowing modules from the greenhouse, giving them a clean, mixing up the organic compost from Sylvagrow with vermiculite to aid water retention, filling the modules with it and carefully placing a seed or two in each cell. Then lightly covering the seeds with more compost, writing a label with date and type of veg, placing in a watering tray for a while, and carefully balancing it on a suspended plank in the polytunnel that serves as a mice-proof shelf. This is particularly useful as I've been sowing lots of peas and broad beans, both of which the little critters are very partial to.

When visiting a friend on Thursday I was alarmed to see he had 15cm-tall broad bean seedlings in modules looking very healthy, and which were in fact already being “hardened off” i.e. placed outside during the day to get used to the cooler outdoor air. They must have been sown a few weeks ago already whereas mine only got pushed into the compost this week and have yet to sprout.

I do have a small tray of tomato seedlings however, kept safe and warm inside Anna's house, along with my second batch of onion seedlings that look like they may be going the same way as the first batch - getting droopy without thickening up and reaching straight upwards. They sit next to a tray of mixed lettuce seedlings, just beginning to emerge, and my ten potatoes slowly chitting, or producing sprouts out of their heads.

Onion seedlings a bit droopy

Apart from sowing, I've been shifting and sifting poo. Shifting it from my neighbour's pile of rotted horse manure, putting it into sacks which Anna and I push through a thorny hedge to be loaded onto my trailer on the other side. And sifting it back at HQ Polytunnel, removing all the naughty weed root systems buried within it so my soil doesn't get infected with them. Then shifting it again, wheelbarrowing it off to the garden to be spread and dug in, or just left on top of the asparagus bed. It's slow, smelly, messy but necessary work, and I'll be glad when it's over!

Darley Abbey in Derby, on a recent weekend break