Spring is here (or just around the corner)

Cheers for Debby H for getting in touch with us today. She sent us a pic of daffodils in full bloom in a council maintained bed near her home in North London (above) and they look great!

Debby has recently started off some tomato and cosmos seeds. The cosmos seeds were straight off the flower heads of the plants they grew last year. After being left in a box all winter they were sown a couple of days ago. As she said: “We just scattered the whole dead heads on earth/compost and covered them over. We didn’t bother to try to separate out the seeds first. Within two days the little things were germinating madly!”  (Photo above). That is crazy! The seeds must have had exactly the right conditions that they loved as two days is good going for germination.

Debby told us a great tip that she used with the cosmos seedlings (pic above): “I re-planted some of them in an egg box as they were growing too densely. The idea Is that, when they are ready to go outside, I will cut the egg box into individual sections, then plant each section separately. As the egg box is made of cardboard it should bio-degrade so I won’t need to remove the seedlings from the box partitions before planting them.” That is a top idea, we have been using some biodegradable pots from B&Q but this idea is better. What we usually do with our egg boxes is chuck them on the compost heap but we reckon we’ll be putting seeds in them!

Cheers Debby, thanks again and look forward for more pics soon!

Tulips from Lew-is-sham

Yesterday we popped into that shopping emporium Lewisham Lldl and spied some gardening bargains. There were various variety packs of mixed summer bulbs and corms and we picked this one which was “Flower Masses Collection” for around £6. No idea if it is an actual bargain or not, but there’s 40 bulbs in there including one dahlia that went in a large pot near the house with a transparent plastic bag over it to keep any cold weather out. Also there’s some gladioli, lilly and african corn lilies that went in the ground probably a bit early but these things burn a hole in our pockets and we’re far too impatient to wait until the risk of frost is over sadly.

The bulb planting reminded us of a daft story from the Westminster City Council Gardening days that was covered in the Sounds From The South spot that we used to do many many moons years ago for the gardening programme The Dirt on Manchester’s Fab Radio International (show below). We wonder where Watford Mick is now?

There’s also a silly episode about when a gardener met some of his punk heroes in his council regulation Donkey Jacket here.

Best of luck with the weather and happy gardening over the bank holiday break!