My Shropshire Garden: March 2013

Thursday 21 March 2013

Onions and Radish - Mid March 2013

Radish Seedlings

I noticed that my Radish seedlings are starting to come up. I planted them at the beginning of March and they are now just popping up. I have put them underneath a cloche for now, as our British weather is drunk and doesn't know what it is doing.

I have been checking Metcheck.com quite a lot recently, I love this site as it is one of the most accurate that I have found so far, that actually updates roughly hourly using local weather stations, it's awesome.

Metcheck is good as it gives you a good idea for the night-time temperatures for your area and just looking at mine, I can see that it's still pretty cold at night.

My beautiful pumpkin starts were hit really bad by the hard frost we had the other week, and even though they were under cover in a mini greenhouse, they have still died, so I think I will have to plant the seed direct into the SFG ( Square Foot Garden). I have had a look at the seed packet and it said to plant out in March, but I think I'll leave it till the end of March as the weather is still taking tequila shots.

The onion sets have survived, although they haven't grown much the past couple of weeks. (By the way, the grid you can see, it's to stop the cats digging in the garden)

You can see them all bending to the light which tells me that there aint much of it at the moment.

I'm probably going to plant out at the end of march, everything that needs to go out. I reckon that with the way everything is going, the seeds will no doubt take a while to send up shoots but the bed should be warm and well-drained enough to keep the seeds viable.

Monday 11 March 2013

Squeak the Cat

This is 'Squeak' my cat, he is 10 years old and sleeps like a dog!

Squeak.

Sunday 10 March 2013

And it's Snowing Again...

More snow. Huzzah,

Square Foot Garden Update

My SFG (Square Foot Garden) is coming along really well. Last weekend I popped down to Aldi and bought 6 grow-bags to fill up the SFG. It is just about enough but I think I need a few more to bring the level of the soil up to within an inch of the top. As you can see, I'll probably need another 3-4 bags of compost to make it work.

More Compost

I am going to go to a garden centre and buy some decent compost, probably a John Innes mix or something. In his book, All New Square Foot Gardening - Mel Bartholomew recommends that we use a mix of at least 5 different composts from 5 different sources. That gets pretty expensive. I don't have a good £100 hanging around so it'll have to be a mix of three for now.

Also in the book, Mel talks about how to add a trowel-full of compost to the bed once you harvest a crop, so I was thinking that if I spend a bit on money on some good compost, and add that, by the year is out then it will have a recommended mix.

Vermiculite

I've also bought some coarse vermiculite and at £7.45 per bag I wont be buying any more any time soon, it's bloody expensive for such a small bag!

Sowing the Seeds

I've been sowing seed like crazy and have a mini three tier green house that the more hardy sowings can go in, my kitchen windowsill is getting pretty packed and DB is getting pissed at the amount of pots and propagators that are everywhere in the kitchen.