Salad Box

Earlier in the year, I sowed a variety of cut-and-come-again salad leaves in a shallow fruit box. All was going well and I was getting a few side salads a week. However, in midsummer, our landlord decided the roof needed resurfacing, and all the plants had to be taken into our sitting room. The salad leaves were the worst affected by their time in the relative darkness, and by the time they could go back outside, they had been decimated by a plague of green fly, and soon died.
I sowed some more as soon as possible, and here the results:

I'm not entirely sure what I've got going on in here, but I think far left is Red Salad Bowl, with one or two Lollo Rossa mixed in, then Cos Freckles. Next is what I think must be Red Salad Bowl again, only with darker red leaves, followed by Green Salad Bowl on the right. In between are the scattered seeds of Winter Mix, containing Mustard Red Frills, Kale Scarlet, Kale Blue Curled, Mizuna CN, and Rocket Dentellata.
This box alone provides more leaves than I can keep up with, particularly if the weather is sunny. Mizuna and Mustard are borderline unstoppable, so another time I would sow a lot less of this seed mix. The upside is they germinate super fast, and should carry on into the winter if given some cover. The Mustard and Rocket get a stronger taste as they go to flower, so I will remove them at this point.

I can't recommend growing leaves enough, you get so much food off them, really fresh and really cheaply. Love it.

Onion Update

Looking back, I was rather pessimistic about the Pickling Onions I sowed in a bulb planter. I should have been way more optimistic!

They're even bigger now..

I'll take another picture before I pull them up, but the pretty much the whole surface of the pot is covered in Onion. Can't wait to get pickling. I am a big fan of all things Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and I have found a recipe in the River Cottage Handbook No.2 "Preserves" written by Pam Corbin. It's a great book, full of ideas, this particular recipe has honey, root ginger and a cinnamon stick - sounds good to me.

Get. That.

Sowing Seeds Pt. 2 - Indoors Cont.

Courgettes have to to be the ultimate reliable option for a small place gardener; only a one or two plants will produce more than enough for one person if they get going. I sowed seeds of Defender, One Ball, and Patriot at the start of April. They came up within a few days, and grew on well. 

However. They became pot-bound. I think I sowed them too early, so when they were ready to be going outside, the weather was not ready for them. It seems once the roots have been stuck at a certain size, they wont expand again when given more room - when I investigated the roots of the weakening plants, I saw they had not explored the new soil. Of the six plants that looked so good, only one made it on to adulthood. It was a Defender, so is a fairly standard green variety. Rather sad not to have any yellow One Ball survivors, but, lesson is learnt for next year. 

One plant, one bucket: First Courgette!

Bright Lights

Back on the 20th May, I mentioned I had planted some seeds of Chard Bright Lights. I put six seeds in one of the deeper fruit boxes and that now seems about right. One seed produces a few clumps of leaves, each with a different vibrantly coloured stem.

Take a look!

I cook the leaves like spinach..

..and eat the stems raw in salad.

I'm really pleased with how they're doing, in fact, I can barely get through it quick enough to keep up. I started off eating the leaves raw as a salad leaf, but found them, as a friend in work so delicately put it, rather hard to digest! Now I mostly just get through the stems, which add a good splash of colour and crunch to my daily lunch of Roof Top Salad.

Sowing Seeds Pt. 2 - Indoors

No growing attempt would be complete without Tomatoes. While I know that I will never be self sufficient in the sweet juicy fruits that I crave, I wouldn't be happy if I didn't try.

I sowed the seeds in plastic cups indoors way back at the start of April. I bought the varieties Garden Pearl, Sun Gold, Gardeners Delight, and then "borrowed" F1 Tumbler, Tumbling Tom Red, and Tumbling Tom Yellow from my parents. All germinated well, and I repotted them into plastic pots made from 4 pint milk cartons, but only after they had got massively pot bound, and leggy from lack of light. The pot bound-ness hasn't seemed to have affected them, and I countered the leggy growth by planting them much deeper in the soil in their new home. As roots sprout from the stem, this helps to build up a larger root system.

Tomato seedlings with courgettes alongside

When I repotted them into their final homes some time in late June, I again submerged the stem up to the first leaf axil, and, despite an initial set back due to a complete lack of hardening off, they have recovered well and the fruits are now beginning to ripen. Final homes include fruit boxes, cheaply bought buckets from Wilkinsons, and large pots, containing a mix of peat-free and multipurpose compost.

Unfortunately I lost all the little tags, so I'm not sure which variety is look the best, but I think it's F1 Tumbler. It is copping well with the intense heat on the roof, and is totally weighed down with green fruit. I'm not going to pinch out side shoots at this point, as I am convinced the extra light they get up top means they can ripen a limitless amount of tomatoes.