Carrot Seedlings!

These are some other seedlings we planted in early January. As you can see in the picture they are in little pots made of newspaper. I treated myself to a gardening kit for christmas and one of the things that came with it is a paper potter. It is used to turn old newspaper into little seedling pots - the business! I made them as tall as possible - they are around 6 inches high and around 2 inches wide.

There is mold growing on all the pots at the moment - it's the furry stuff in the picture. This is totally fine and won't harm the plants. It's the combination of compost, paper and wetness. I'm probably over-watering them so it'll dry out when I get the balance right.


January is very early for planting carrots though and most people I asked about it said that Febuary even was pushing it a bit, so I don't have a huge amount of hope for the little guys. Carrots have a thing called a tap root - a long, fast growing thin white root that goes straight down. This then swells over the growing season to become the carrot. If the carrot doesn't have enough room to grow down then the tap root gets twisted leading to some crazy mutant shaped carrots. The worry is that the root will reach the bottom of the pot long before it's warm enough to plant them out.

Here we have yellow carrots 'Jaune Obtuse de Doubs', regular orange 'Nantes' carrots, red 'Samurai' carrots and finally purple 'Purple Haze' carrots. The full carrot rainbow!

Aubergines

Aubergines are among the seeds that we planted in early January. These little fellas went in on the 5th. I read in my veg magazine (I'm a veg nerd) that because our summers are so short, it's important to get aubergines going indoors so that they are ready to fruit the second it is sunny enough outside. They are slow growing so should be manageable enough indoors till April. Me and Hugh have a really sunny windowsill they can live on in the meantime.


This is how big they are now. As soon as a few appeared I took of the plastic lid and as soon as the little guy in the middle is a bit bigger I'll put them in their own little paper pots.

I got the seeds from Real Seeds, and they are of the variety "Diamond".

Seed Planting!

I started off a pile of seeds a few weeks ago and they are now starting to look like proper seedlings! I'll put pictures up of them later but for now I wanted to show what I've been planting them in.

This is the style of pot that Wasabi restaurants use to sell their soya beans in. They are perfect for starting plants from seed. The plastic cover acts as a mini-greenhouse, and they are just the right size for getting around 8 seeds planted!

We have red onions, spring onions, leeks, aubergines, carrots, peas and sunflowers started this way. The peas and sunflowers are huge and are hardening off in our freezing cold kitchen before we put them in the greenhouse for the final hardening off. After a few weeks there they should hopefully be ready for planting in the real world!

Pea Shoots!

This is what is keeping me sane while the weather is too freezing to go outside growing anything - Pea Shoots.

Below is a picture of the little fellas being planted. I soaked the peas (regular pea seeds) in water for an hour and then popped them into a little seedling tray, around a cm deep and covered them with compost. When they started appearing i put the whole round of compost with all seedlings into a bigger pot and voila - here they are growing happily in the top picture!

When they get to be a few inches high, cut them down to around an inch and eat the tops. They are nice flavourful little salad leaves. The stalk is nice too. They will grow back again a number of times before they start giving up the ghost.