First sowings of the year

We know we mentioned a couple of posts ago that you don’t want to be too keen on sowing seeds at this time of year, but we’ve started a couple off, seeing as both seeds need a few weeks to germinate.

This morning, we put 3 pots each of Reals Seeds Prairie Fire Mini Bush Chilli Pepper and Lemon Drop Hot Citrus Pepper in a heated seed tray. This year we’re using some B&Q bought Rocket Gro seed/cutting compost as the cheap supermarket shop-bought peat-free we bought a while ago just weren’t that good and we lost a load of seedings to the dreaded damping off.

On looking at the packets, the Prairie Fire takes 2-3 weeks to germinate and the Lemon Drop 3-4, now that’s a long wait. We will be training patience in this exercise and will keep you in the loop if we see any movement at all.

It pays not to be too keen

This week we read a facebook post from Real Seeds about why it’s best not to rush into starting seeds off too early, even though some chillies do benefit from an early start. The main point was that you usually end up with leggy plants far too soon, with nowhere to put them. As they said: “Resist, unless you have ample heated space and use grow lights.”

We have been in this position a few times before. We start the year being very keen and then in March end up with leggy tomato plants sitting on the windowsill (above). Seeing that the frost down here can be as late as mid April that ain’t much cop. To get a bit of an idea of when your last frost could be, stick your postcode into lastfrostdate.co.uk here. This is what we got:

We are going to resist for the time being, and have ordered some seed compost and in a couple of weeks time will get the heated seed tray out and start off some chillies, but until then we will do little and often in the garden if the weather allows. We got two big bags of multi purpose compost today and filled a couple of raised beds just before the sun went down. Total time in the garden, ten minutes. It’s a start!

It may be some while before we can get back out there again as there’s a cold spell coming. To cheer ourselves up we can always open up the seed tin and read the back of seed packets. Here’s a few nice packs we got for Christmas (below). Better (weather) will come!