Tag: chillies

Seed Sowing Starts

It felt oh so good today to be sowing the first seeds of the year! And to make things even better it was warm and cosy in the greenhouse. There are so many seeds waiting in my tin all organised in sowing date order.

So today I sowed seeds of tomatoes, peppers (sweet, cayenne and hot), basil, parsley and leeks.

We always sow a variety of tomatoes to ensure lots of different colours, textures and flavours, so for 2012 we have Gardeners Delight, Moneymaker, Red Cherry, Black Cherry, Harbinger and a heritage variety called Potentate. Of course to go with tomatoes we need basil so we have sown Basil Sweet Genovase.

All the seeds sown today need warmth to germinate so we have put them in my home-made propagator which gives bottom heat and maintains an average 20 degrees celsius. Here they are in their special warm environment waiting for the lid to be closed.

And the seed potatoes are “chitting” away in their egg trays. So the allotment year has been launched and it feels good!!

Tags allotments, chillies, fruit and veg, fruit and vegetable growing, gardening, greenhouse gardening, grown your own, peppers

allotments fruit and veg garden photography gardening grow your own

Winter Solstice Harvest

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date December 21, 2011

What better thing for a gardener to do on the shortest day of the year than to harvest home-grown produce!! Today we harvested our Charlotte potatoes that we have been growing in potato bags, planted in early September and moved into the cool unheated end of the greenhouse when the temperatures dropped.

We also had the privilege of cutting the last of our chillies and capsicums also growing in the greenhouse following the same regime as for the potatoes. The capsicums were pretty small and still green but the chillies were large and brightly coloured. We have been using them straight from the plants for months now but night-time temperatures have made the plants look as if they are exhausted or fed up of the cold.

A couple of hours on the allotment harvesting and hoeing made the shortest day worthwhile. Just think from now on every day will be a little bit longer. Great!!!

The “Undergardener” got busy with the hoe before harvesting leeks, while I dug up mooli, parsnips, swede and two roots of purple sprouts. We pulled up some Florence Fennel, radicchio and chicory. The chicory will have its leaves trimmed off and the roots replanted into a deep pot with a matching pot on top for forcing.

One row of parsnips produced a crop of reasonably sized roots whereas the second row we dug up produced just disappointment. Sad skinny little roots the size of my little finger! I think I shall blame the dry weather! No, I exaggerate, they are nowhere near as big as my little finger. We could start a new trend – bootlace parsnips!

Fennel foliage like feathery ferns treats us to a warm aniseed scent. The little “bulbs”, swollen stems really will add a warming flavour to veg soups.

Purple sprouts taste no different but their colour gives extra interest to a winter roast. but of course the real reason we grow them is because they look so good on the lottie.

Tags chillies, florence fennel, greenhouse gardening, leeks, parsnips, potatoes, sprouts

autumn gardening grow your own half-hardy perennials

Bubble Wrap Duvet

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date November 7, 2011

Today we woke to the first frost of the year. My phone tells me its minus one. It’s only a thin weak frost but a useful reminder of how lucky we are to have gone this far into the year without one. Last year we had our first in September and that was not unusual. It also made us feel a little smug that we had got round to giving the greenhouse its duvet of bubble wrap at the weekend. It takes 100 metres of the large bubbled wrap to get the inside safely wrapped for winter – it is the only time I regret owning such a big greenhouse!

Bubble wrap is always so hard to fix up and always looks a mess but it does the job. We used a combination of black gaffer tape and the little plastic fiddly fixings specially designed for the job.

We moved under cover the peppers, chillies and sweet, growing in bags to hopefully get a few more fruits from them as well as the potatoes in their bags planned for cropping in December. We then had the time-consuming task of bringing in any half-hardy plants in pots such as aeoniums, begonias, echeverias, Euphorbia mellifera, salvias and summer flowering bulbs.

As a belt and braces procedure we take cuttings of some of the salvias, as well as bringing the parent plants in, as they often fail to survive through the winter even under the protection of the greenhouse.

This Salvia with its stunning red flowers which have an added cerise hue in sunlight only started flowering in late October so we could only appreciate its glorious flowers for a few weeks before bringing it into the greenhouse. If the first frost had come at the more usual time in late September or early October presumably it would have failed to flower this year. fingers crossed now that we can keep it through to warmer times.