2021 - What I did today

Thursday is for Leaves - potted on some kale seedlings, pulled up bolting lettuce in GH to make space for tomatoes.

Main job of the day was weeding and remodelling the Bean house (3 unglazed GH frames, joined, end to end). Made the side beds wider - need to dig out the grass and weeds there tomorrow as it will soon be time to plant the beans.
Also weeded the next pair of beds (which used to be inside a cheap PT where I grew peaches a few years ago.) The PT collapsed, most of the peach trees were relocated but one remains, with a couple of small apricots and a little pear tree.
If you can imagine the layout of a GH, centre path, beds either side - no way out at the far end - that's what I'll have this year - but 3 of them, side by side, like a terrace of houses. There'll be a photo sometime so don't try too hard to understand me.

Didn't do much this morning as it was very cold, but mid day went up for the dog and went for a walk, then late afternoon I potted on 15 fuchsia plants

I've potted on the rest of the micro-dwarf tomatoes. I have ten plants out of the twelve seeds that I sowed, and eight of them are looking particularly good. (The other two consist of one where I snapped the stem just before potting on, and one that only had one seed leaf rather than two so got a bit behind. However, both have their first true leaves, so I am hoping they will catch up soon.)

I have a very limited compost supply (just the one 40L bag that I bought a couple of months ago) and some of my seeds are rather out of date, so I recently decided to try getting seeds to germinate in damp cloths inside plastic Ziploc bags so I could just use compost for seeds that were actually viable and ready to go. I wasn't sure it was going to work (originally, I only had access to blue jay cloths, where most of the videos I have watched used paper kitchen towels) so just started with three sets of seeds: some very old dill, the dwarf sunflowers I got free from Morrisons, and some sweetcorn that is supposed to be for microgreens. Well, about a third of the dill seeds and all of the sunflower seeds have germinated, so I have put those in some compost in some old fruit punnets from Tesco this evening. A couple of the sweetcorn kernels have sprouted as well, so I am hoping that most of them will have germinated by Monday when I next have a day off, and I can get them sown as well.

My little indoor garden currently has: five houseplants of various kinds, some shop-bought spring onions that keep resprouting in a jar of compost (much better than the trick I have tried before of keeping them in water), some cress, some pea shoots, some radishes (not sure if I will get actual radishes, but I can also eat the greens), three hyacinths where I am waiting for the foliage to die back so I can store the bulbs, ten micro-dwarf tomatoes, dill, dwarf sunflowers, and two sprouting jars with radish and fenugreek sprouts that should both be ready in a couple of days.

I have just cut down the remnants of my last container of pea shoots. As I need to conserve/reuse the compost as much as possible, I think I am just going to throw lots of cress seeds in there as they should still grow well between the stalks/roots of the old pea shoots. I just have to decide what to sow next (but after the weekend, as I'm working).

The other day, my flatmate asked me who the plants on the living room windowsill belonged to. As there's only me and her in the flat, and the plants are clearly cared for and increasing in number, I am left with some concerns about her powers of deductive reasoning...

Cleated most of the chard, leaf beet and celery from the soon to be pumpkin bed. It us so much easier to lift bolted chard when voles have eaten 90%of the roots!
Planted out some climbing haricot and pea beans, and the only sunflower to survive the attack of the fungus gnats.
Helped MrPP use the hole borer to put up a small run of post and rail at the front. It will have a electric line at the top to try and keep the roe deer out - they've just made the first incursion of the year, stripping two young maples, a rose and damaging a kazan. This latter has some of my dad's ashes underneath and the damage made me a bit teary.
We then had to down tools when we realised we'd driven a bird off a nest in a scrubby bush where we were working. Hope she will come back - given I garden for wildlife diversity this was a terrible, mistake to make.

Now that OH can get out she wants to spend some money so we went looking for wallpaper which will go well with the new three piece suite she has bought I dropped some hints that it was a nice day and could get some garden work done, finally got home and after a cup of coffee was getting ready to get out when our son phoned asking for assistance to put up a new potting shed that he bought(too much of his mother in him, spending money like that) after 4hrs. I was back home just in time to make the tea, after tea I got out to the garden a neighbour is lifting his grass so I got the opportunity to get some turf which I have now stacked hopefully to creat some loam next year, after that I covered all the plants I have outside hardening off and all the plants in the greenhouse with fleece

Friday is for flowers so I went to Lidl to buy one of their special offer Pepino plants - but they didn't have any! So I went to Aldi who had even less plants but I did buy a potted Basil for 49p which has had a haircut and his cuttings are now in water.
Back home, I did some pruning of the Hardy Fuchsias, Hydrangea, a shrub that I've never named and a couple of apple trees. Pulled up lots of Cow parsley and cleared more of the "Garden near the house".
Heavy rain forecast for tomorrow so I should have brought the garden tools in..........but forgot!!!

Watered and fed all my plants with my seaweed mix. Then went for a spin on my newly purchased quad.

Watered and fed all my plants with my seaweed mix. Then went for a spin on my newly purchased quad.

Can, what is you seaweed mix?

The only Wild thing about my Wild Card Weekend was the weather and a power cut. I've hardly left the house today.
I have put some ancient jiffy pellets to soak so, maybe some seeds will be sown tonight?

EDIT Shoved some Buckles Black Runner beans in the Jiffies. I saved these last year grown from a local bean. Some plants had red pods, others green so I'm only growing the beans from the red pods to see whether they revert to green or stay red.

Rain abated around 13.00 so popped to the plot.

Just a bit of seed sowing

Sweet corn
Runners
Carrots
Squash
Courgettes