It’s the little things in life

We took a walk in the garden this morning to check on everything especially stuff that was undercover in old jam jars and home made cloches as it’s been quite cold the last couple of nights. By the way if you ever need a last frost estimator you can check here but it’s only a guide. We do it the old fashioned way and check the weather forecast.

On the inspection we saw that the Egyptian Walking Onions were bursting into life and it looks like there’s a start of some topsets forming (above).

And these (above) are the first of the Mashua that has come up too which we got from the seed swap a few weeks ago. These Nasturtium type plants have edible tubers if you get the right conditions which we’ll doubt we’ll have in SE23 but who knows, stranger things have happened.

Spring may have sprung

One great thing we love with this gardening lark is the passing on of surplus seeds from one gardener to another. This week we received a little package off a gardening friend with some interesting seeds and stuff that we’ve never grown before (Cheers again Ruth!)

Firstly there was a small envelope with some Amaranth seeds (more on them here) which we’ll be sowing in a sunny area in the garden as they like that. Also in a brown bag was a climber called Mashua which we’ve never heard of before, turns out it’s climbing Nasturtium with deep orange-red trumpet flowers with edible tubers and the young leaves can be eaten in a salad. You learn something every day, especially in gardening!

The other bag contained some Jerusalem Artichokes (aka Sunchoke), we read it’s not like the globe variety but a kind of sunflower with an edible tuber. We’ve also learnt they can spread like wildfire but we will be giving them a go. We’ll keep you posted on how we get on with everything above. Any tips appreciated!

And on the shortwave radio tomorrow evening at 10pm UK time is a repeat of a transmission of a while back of KSOL which features a mix from One Deck Pete called “A bit of sunshine and soul” which feature tunes by Jackie Lee & Delores Hall, Cat Stevens, George McCrae, Carl Bean and Love Unlimited. If you haven’t a shortwave radio you can tune in here.