Seed sowing season

Golly does this work? My friend Emerald, the excellent website builder / creator has just updated the site. If you want someone to make you an incredible website, contact me and I’ll pass on her details.

And of course I am supposed to be WAY more creative with my layout and content now. All sorts of marvellous templates are just waiting for me at the tap of a button…

And that would be easy peasy if I gave myself hours to learn how to play on the site.

And if I didn’t have not one, but two, fingers swathed in sticking plasters against bramble thorns.

Just tapping is hilariously ‘interesting’.

And if the cat didn’t leap onto my desk and walk across my track pad every ten minutes…

I tell you, seed sowing is much, much easier.

I just love this season. Out come all the trays and the carefully hoarded sowing compost. (I need more. But at 70 litres a sack, my favourite Floragard is way too heavy for me to bench press right now.) And out comes the box of seeds I have been accumulating all winter.

I have gone suitably mad with flower seeds.

I’m trying a lot more of the helichrysum varieties and other seeds for dried flower arrangements this year.

And it is easily the most peaceful morning’s work in the potting shed. Setting up the trays, doing the labels, sowing, watering, fending off the cat from the flat surfaces… rearranging so they all catch the sun.

Note to self. Must go up onto the roof and clear some of the Virginia creeper dead leaves off the roof to let in maximum light. And clean all the windows…

Actually I had a crisis the very first day.

I discovered that my craft sticks absorb water and erase the information of what I sow. They were disappearing before my very eyes like litmus paper taking up a chemical. Or for the modern allusion. Like a covid antigen test shooting up the stick.

So the first night I did that other peaceful seed sowing chore…

Painting the sticks with an emulsion paint. A lovely task I really ought to have prepared ahead of time.

That’s the great thing about gardening. You forget which chores need doing from one year to the next.

And how about this for an innovation. It’s a good use of an old fridge tray rack. All the sticks dried without that annoying stick to the paper bit. They dried in no time. Two coats of paint. And were I to be really clever I might have done some sticks in a colour for the flower seeds, and another for the vegetables.

But this is not Instagram. This is a mass seed sowing exercise and I have so many jobs outside to get done.

And so far I can read what I’ve sown.

There are a few trays which get to germinate indoors in the warm living room in front of the south facing huge window.

Others just get put in the potting shed and if they are really flagging I will rotate.

And now that is done, it’s on with lifting dahlias.