Pic: The grass outside this morning.
The sun’s been out, it feels lovely and warm and you feel a real need to sow those seeds outside or get those seedlings into those freshly prepared beds. Think again, do your research, watch those John Craven’s Countryfile weather forecasts and have a look at the frost calculator here.
You only want to be going to the garden centre/nursery for those bedding plants once. Watch out for frost!
Pic: John “good bloke” Craven
We’ve always had this thing about those plastic plant labels. You buy a pack and you have the best intentions of keeping them for ages (using Barkeeper’s Friend to clean off “Lettuce” or whatever their last usage was) then you lose them or they snap and you vow never to use them again.
Yesterday we thought “Never mind that!” and just got a “sharpie” and snapped a few bamboo canes into quarters. Saved us a load of hassle. We then stuck some polythene sheeting on top of some pallet box collars and there you go, a makeshift cloche full of clearly named rows of broccoli, cabbage, leek and beetroot!
Where has that sun gone to, the one that appeared here the weekend and the same one that contributed to Sunday being 17°C? You will laugh, as over the weekend we even put some plants out in the back garden to harden off. It’s only March and we’re thinking about hardening off plants, we must be crazy. The above pic is a of self-seeded tomato in front of some suncream, after sun and insect repellent, a taste of things to come you reckon?
Do remember that frost prediction site here as that will come in handy if you’ve got that “we’ll get those seeds/plants in early” feeling like us. It’s nearly there but do wait a little before sticking those plants out. Have you seen the forecast for this week?
Cheers to Debby H for sending us a message: “We found a small cardboard box in one of our cupboards recently. It had strange shoots coming out of the ends. Upon opening it we saw two small potatoes that had sprouted. We had forgotten that we stored them away last autumn to be used as seed potatoes. We planted them in a flower pot and now they are growing quite well.” Brilliant stuff and hope they give a good harvest.
Talking of potatoes, one of the things with growing spuds in the soil outside is leaving a few small ones in there even if you think you have pulled every one up. Then come the year after, you get “volunteers” sprouting up. We wonder could these volunteers be moved and would they give you a good harvest. Your thoughts please.
And back to Debby H’s garden here’s the daffodils and primroses that are doing well. Cheers Debby!
Garden updates are always welcomed here. Send any pics to one deck pete (at symbol) geemail dot com.
It’s been a funny old week for weather, we’ve had some lovely days of sunshine (still a bit nippy at times out of the sun though) and then frost in the mornings like today (above). Don’t let the sunshine fool you! It’s just only turned March and as AI has just informed us “Plant out after the chance of frost has passed” means to wait until the last possible frost date in your area has passed before planting your seedlings outdoors. More on having a vague idea when your last frost date is here. Do remember though nature doesn’t always play to the rules.
Don’t get lulled into a false sense of security just because we’ve had some lovely days. We’ve even had some washing out on a couple of them but that don’t mean those leggy tomato plants (if you started them off on New Year’s Day like we used to do) can go out.
We did manage to do some jobs like finally getting around to cutting up some prunings from next door’s tree which will be burning in the fire pit in a few month’s time (above). In the picture next to the gardening recycling bin are the loppers we bought in Lldl many years ago where the person on the till said twice “Do keep the recipt handy just in case you need to return them”.
Make use of this bout of sunshine but don’t put out those geraniums out just yet!
Cheers to Mike and Julia from near Coventry for a picture of their new basil grown hydroponically and we must say the basil is looking far better than ours that we’ve started to grow on our kitchen windowsill.
Also thanks to Debby H for sending us some pictures of the first flowers in her garden. “Our snowdrops had their flowers eaten by something, which was disappointing. We have been more successful with the dwarf daffodils (tete-a-tetes?), which are now beginning to flower.”
“We have had primroses/primulas for quite a while. They are the conventional yellow colour but there are also a few red/purple ones. Lovely to have some colour in the garden.” Debby’s right
We here at Weeds hope everything is starting to pop up now in your gardens, if you’re not in those parts of the world that are covered in snow at the moment.
A big thank you to Katie and all the team at Thompson & Morgan Blog for sending us over these new vegetable seeds to see how we get on with them. They look great, so this afternoon we popped 4 of the chilli seeds into compost to start off. Quick Fire is the variety and it mentions on the pack that you can get up to 100 chillies per plant! We’ll keep you all posted on how we get on with all of them. Cheers again T&M!
Thanks to all at Thompson & Morgan blog for including a tip of ours in their new article “Money saving garden tips: cost-effective seed sowing” here. It’s a great article and a great blog to check out.
By the way we hope that anyone who has sowed early like us is having some success and the seeds are starting to germinate. Looks like the chili seeds we had that said “Sow by end of 2023” haven’t, but that’s a risk you got to take with out of date seeds. Good luck with what you stick in your seed trays!
We were looking back through the blog for a tune to accompany a forthcoming blog post and found this video from 2016 here. It’s from Mind Enterprises with a great tune called Idealistic with a spoof video of a “better than well” guru cult complete with a lovely bit of Tai chi-like dancing throughout it. Do have a pen and paper and your credit card details handy for the end!
Thanks a lot to our good mate Justin Patrick Moore for sending us some photographs of the extreme weather in Cincinnati at the moment, and we thought it was a bit cold here! Temperature is around -3 at the moment with -9 degrees C overnight with even -13 later on some nights this week. We are not going complain about the weather here any more, ever. Great pictures Justin. And here’s one of his back garden.
And if you fancy a great listen, below is the audio of Trash Flow Radio broadcast on WAIF 88.3 FM from Sat Dec 28 and as it says here:
“DJ Justin Patrick Moore returned to hold down the fort one more time. Hot on the heels of his outstanding recent book event in Cincinnati, Justin was joined in the studio by Slumdog Ethan and Old WAIFer Douglas. Together, they provided more audio accompaniment to Justin‘s new book “The Radio Phonics Laboratory.” They also spun choice esoteric tracks from all around the world, including tracks from: Tristwch Y Fenywod, Chelsea Wolfe, Tanya Tagaq, The Fauns, Melody’s Echo Chamber, The Skull Defekts, idialedyournumber, Alan Sparhawk, Josh Datko (Bitpunk.fm), An-Ting 安婷, Controlled Bleeding, Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang, The Limiñanas, Shilpa Ray, Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, and more!” Tracklist here.
There’s an archive of the last 15 shows here if you fancy it too. Radio connects us all.
Weeds up to me knees 