Grow Your Own Magazine

Forget all this rubbish about "the mildest February ever, ever, ever..." we've had some of the hardest frosts for years. Some of the garden soil has not thawed at all in the daylight hours.

And the same happened in December.

It has been sunny during the day, but the nights are really vicious.

And I still have to listen to people on the train who say "oooh! It's so warm... that's climate change".

If you were a seedling...

Cutecumber

If there was an award for list-writing, I would surely win it.

I have lists of:

seeds that I have bought
seeds I want to buy
when I want to sow the seeds
pots I might use for different vegetables
fertilisers and soil improvers I must use up
the length of time the vegetables take to mature...

...and on they go.

The crucial point is that none of this actually gets anything done. The seeds are still in their...

Cutecumber

It reached 25 degrees in the greenhouse yesterday.

The remaining over-wintering leaves are still going, although the claytonia is infested with greenfly and they are spreading fast!

One week old lettuce, cabbage and cauliflower seedlings (just a couple of each) are faring better than their earlier sown cousins which I ditched. I think these later ones will be OK, they are more sturdy.

Shallots (from seed) and spring onions are doing the grass thing in...

Cutecumber

I'd like to see a bit more common sense at this time of year.

Growing your own is not a competition (unless you show stuff, of course ).

It doesn't matter if you don't sow two months earlier than the seed packets tell you to.

Don't be fooled by what other people are doing, consider your own situation.

Ask yourself some questions:

1) where am I gardening? Do I have the "average" conditions that the books...

Cutecumber

Success with my strawberry and shallot seeds!

I have grown strawberries from runners and shallots from shallot sets, but I don't like to do things the easy way all the time

There's not a lot of strawberry seed around but I managed to find Mignonette and Baron Solemacher. A few of each have now germinated - after a week on a windowsill - much better than ones I tried in December.

Similarly, the shallots - Ambition and Matador have been sown indoors...

Cutecumber