And now the saga continuums

The first sowings of the year are now in the ground.

First up is Swift potatoes, which as their name suggests are supposed to be the quickest on the market - planting mid-February is supposed to result in a mid-April harvest. I picked this variety back in November, when I still thought the challenge would be a going concern and I was going to have to feed myself until June. Thankfully that's no longer the case, but I'm intrigued by the idea of a longer potato season and I'm hoping these will work as advertised. Last year's new potatoes were ready late June, so that's the mark they have to beat to be a success.

The seed potatoes have been chitting on my windowsill for the past couple of weeks, but with somewhat of a disappointing lack of results.

Underwhelming, and not promising for mid-April early potatoes.

Chitting is actually supposed to speed up potato growth, as it lets them get their first bit of growing done inside in the warmth, and I was hoping for a bit more from them. However, they're going in the potato growing bags today whether they like it or not, so hopefully they've got enough of a head start.

Due to special offers from the mail order company that I used, it was as cheap to have three packets of seed potatoes as it was to have two. Therefore I've also got Anya potatoes, a small, nobbly, tasty new potato that you may have seen in Sainsburys, and Purple Majesty, which are the logical extension of last year's Salad Blue variety. The Salad Blues were pleasingly mottled purple, but didn't taste particularly spectacular and went an unappetising grey when cooked, whereas the Purple Majesty are alleged to be purple through and through, stay purple when cooked and taste delicious. They are a vital part in my ambition of making purple soup, so hopefully they'll live up to their reputation as well.

Anyway, the downside of having three varieties of potatoes is that you cannot buy any of the interesting varieties in anything less than 1.5kg bags. I'm planting 5 sacks of the Swift and I'll still have 7-8 seed potatoes left over and I expect to have the same for the Anya as well (haven't calculated the purple ones yet).

With that in mind, is anyone in and around Bath planning on growing potatoes? If so, you are welcome to the seed potatoes free, the instructions are here from last year and I will even provide some old compost bags for you to grow them in - all you'd need to buy is about £5 worth of compost. Comment here or on Facebook please.

The same has happened with my onions - I buy them as sets (basically dried onion seedlings that you just put in the ground and they grow to full size) and you can only buy them in packets of 50. Since I'm growing both red and white onions and they have to be planted 12cm apart, that's an entire bed of 1.25m2 filled with the buggers and, while I like onions, I've got more interesting things to plant as well. So if anyone wants some onion sets, they're welcome to those as well, although they'd require ground rather than pots or bags, so only good to people who have a garden.

As for other early growers, I am repeating my experiment for indoor carrots again this year, with the hope of getting better results. Not sure I fancy my chances, but never mind. I've also planted some very early broccoli seedlings, in the hope that I'll be able to spread out my broccoli harvest this year, instead of a frantic few weeks of harvesting and freezing everything. They are both currently under the artificial sun that my wife built, which is still standing because I wasn't involved in its construction.

Outside, there are some overwintering plants that I suspect will mostly come to nothing. The mild winter has meant that the cauliflower has got cocky and started producing small heads already, which will almost certainly be destroyed in the inevitable late cold snap. The carrots are, well, carrots and we know my opinions on those already. The only bright sparks are the broad beans, which are going great guns having been sown in late November. Beans of varying varieties have been the major success story of the garden, so I'm hoping these will continue the fine traditions of those that went before them.

Maybe I should just harvest it now and save myself the disappointment? 

Broad beans, momentarily released from their cat protection for the photograph. I hate next door's cats, the little shitting nightmares.

Next bit of planting won't happen for another fortnight - the weather's got to brighten up a bit first. Hopefully it won't do anything weird like March snow again.

PJW

Artificial sun, mk 2

About a month ago, I decided to adjust the reflector on my seedling sunlamp just a tiny little bit. Unfortunately, as you may recall, the reflector's build quality was typical of my construction work and was held together by sellotape, blu-tac, inertia and prayer.

The inevitable happened and I just managed to catch all the pieces before they destroyed my latest set of seedlings. Thankfully, my baby daughter was in bed at the time or she would've learned several new and interesting words.

It was at this point that my wife decided it was cruel to let me struggle on alone and offered her expertise. She designed and built for me this magnificient creation:

I don't think it looks that much sturdier than mine, do you?

Instead of being built from cardboard, wire and sellotape, this setup is built from hardboard, square dowel and metal fixings to hold it all together. More importantly, the reflector itself is supported from a base on the floor, rather than the previous method of having everything attached to the light fixture and creating a single point of failure.

So, this brand new and improved reflector was created, and that was of course the signal for the bulb to break. Massively annoying; it didn't even have the decency to break in some devastating fashion - the pin broke on the bayonet fitting. It still works, but it won't stay in the socket anymore.

However, that was the excuse I needed to buy another and buy bigger. The new bulb is 105W and kicks out 6800 lumen rather than the paltry 4300 lumen of the old one.

In laymans terms, it's gone from "Ow that hurts," to "AGGGHHH!" if you look directly into it.

Unfortunately, the month-long gap has not been kind to my seedlings. The best windowsill I have is still not particularly bright, as we're semi-detached and the south side of our house is the adjoining wall to the next one.

Up == Light, right? The carrots told us that was right.

The current seed tray is replacement cauliflowers for those lost, chard, tomatoes, peppers and a rather optimistic attempt at growing a globe artichoke plant from seed. None of them are particularly irreplaceable, but I'm really hoping that I don't have to start again.

With any luck, the extra power will be enough to rescue these ones and I can look at moving them outside next weekend.

PJW

Sometimes, I'm not that bright

My last post featured two things - indoor carrots that were struggling from lack of sunlight and couldn't go outside because of the bad weather, and the new sunlight lamp that I'd built to help my seedlings along.

Somehow, I didn't connect these two together until today.

In case anyone's interested in what leggy, undersunlighted seedlings look like, here's the carrots today. Hopefully they'll recover, while also providing a valuable test case to see if the sunlight lamp actually works.

Up == Light, right? Right?

I genuinely can't believe that I didn't realise this before.

PJW

The end of the world in fire and water

The first bit of news is that I have indoor carrots growing!

Need a magnifying glass? I swear they're there.

This is wonderful, as I'd given up on them and gives me the possibility that I may be able to harvest them at the start of April. However, this very much depends on the weather - the half of the experiment that was outside in the plastic greenhouse died a death due to the wind physically removing the greenhouse and tipping the pot over, so I think putting anything this small and fragile outside is asking for trouble while the UK weather forecast still reads "Götterdämmerung."

On the flip side, the plan had been only to keep them inside until they started sprouting, as they don't get much sunlight where they are. I think I'll make a decision after the weekend - given that the wind has managed to rip a wooden post out of a wall and bean me across the head with it; I'd like it to calm down before I put any of my new-grown treasures out in it.

Of course, the current weather also means that all of the preparation work that I spent last month doing for the vegetable garden is in danger of travelling to Oz and setting up a benevolent dictatorship there. The brassica net cages are wired very firmly onto walls, the bottom 6" is buried in the soil and there are bamboo canes acting as struts for all the corners. So far, only one of the four is still standing. I'm hoping the wires have broken, rather than the nets themselves.

I have managed to do one exciting bit of preparation indoors, which is the new seed trays for growing my vegetable seedlings, complete with a sunlight lamp.

Not pictured - the windpocalypse outside

 

Last year, I got a bit overexcited with the idea of planting seeds and started around this time of the year. I revelled in the little green sprouts, and made all sorts of detailed plans about when I was going to put them outside and then was well and truly scuppered by the fact that snow lasted all the way through March.

A valuable note about seedlings on windowsills - they're not very tolerant of not getting much light. A seedling's very simple idea of the world is up = light, light = up. Therefore, if I haven't enough light, then I need more up. There's no use explaining to them that up won't help and that light is hidden behind the horrible slate grey clouds and that they're already on the best windowsill in the house for what little light there is. I'd woken them up and they were going to keep growing till they had enough light dammit.

I ended up having to put the gangly poor things out of their misery when they reached 4 inches long and relied mostly on shop-bought seedlings that year.

This year, I'm hoping to cheat with technology. Indoor lighting normally does nothing for plants, as the light that they give off is a) too weak and b) the wrong colour, being tilted more towards the reds and yellows of the spectrum. This bulb gives 4300 lumen in the same light spectrum as the sun, which involves more blue light which is the one that plants photosynthesise from. In theory, in close proximity to the seedlings, it should be enough to help them alongside the sunlight from the window.

Building the lamp itself was a challenge - I started with a cheap clip-on socket for £2.99 and came up with the plan of clipping it to the window catch. This worked fine until the bulb arrived - it's about as long as my forearm and quite heavy. It wouldn't physically fit into the socket until I cut some of the plastic away and then when it did, it wasn't keen on staying horizontal without support.

One jury-rigged bracket from scrap wood later...

The reflector frame is made out of a wire coathanger, a cardboard box, tin foil, some gardening wire and prayer. There is no adjusting of it - it took me three hours and a great number of swear words to get it into place, and another hour after that to put it back together after I "just move this slightly"ed and the whole thing fell apart. It works though - the light is reflected back down with enough force that you don't want to look directly at it when it's on.

No doubt it will encourage my seedlings to grow beautifully, right up until the point it comes loose and crushes them like the hand of a temperamental deity.

The first seeds are sown next weekend - early cauliflower and cabbage. Looking forward to growing again.

PJW