Saturday 29 May 2010

Hardening off in the sun

So we took 9 days off and left the plants to fend for themselves with the help of a friendly waterer coming round to look after them (thank you!) and they've come on leaps and bounds! The ones that we haven't planted out into the troughs yet really are getting a bit too big for their tiny containers now so I've spent the past few days since we've been back hardening them off outside on the windowsills, leaving them out for increasingly lengthy periods of time each day to get them used to the outside world. We're away again for the bank holiday weekend but when we're back I'm going to get them out of their pots and into the troughs.

Friday 14 May 2010

The empire expands...

Today there has been a flurry of activity on the windowsill involving some of the plants actually moving temporarily off the windowsill. Over the past couple of days I have been trying to plan out where things are going to go now that I know what plants I've got that have grown and we're going to have the three windowboxes outside and another two inside that have got special trays in them that stop the water leaking out the bottom.



I've been getting a little worried that some of the tomato plants are getting a bit too big for their little pots and so today I planted up the two troughs that are going to remain inside (as I haven't got around to hardening off any of the plants yet). It's amazing how much compost you need just to fill up two troughs and I had to pop out to pick up some more half way through.

Anyways, at the end of the days planting I've got one trough with a sweet pepper in the middle and a tomato plant at either end and the other ones got a chilli pepper in the middle and tomatoes at the end. I also thought that I'd have a go at putting some of the oregano around the base of one of them and so split two of my pots of oregano up and planted them in four patches at the bottom. I hadn't quite anticipated how tricky it would be to split the root balls of the little oregano plants though so they all fell apart a bit and I've got a feeling that the roots of some ended up with the shoots of others... so we'll wait to see whether their transplantation ends a success or not.



In other exciting news the sweet pepper plant has now got buds on it and all of the sunflowers are developing little buds.



The only down side of planting everything out is that until I get around to hardening off the other plants so that they are able to go outside the troughs have now taken over the kitchen as well as the table!



Wednesday 12 May 2010

Tomato flowers!


Well all has been rather quiet on the windowsill for the last week or so with the plants just quietly getting on with their growing and we were away from the flat for the weekend too so no time to put any work in. But we've got some movement in the tomatoes and the first of the little yellow flowers have started to bud on a couple of them! Everything else just seems to be getting slowly bigger but nothing else to report...

Monday 3 May 2010

Daffodils dead


The torrential rain of the last couple of days has finished off the last of our windowbox daffodils. Over the past few weeks we've had some gorgeous narcissi with multiple yellow flowers coming from one stem but now their time has passed. Unfortunately it would also seem that the wildflower seeds that I planted in the pot a month or so ago have failed to germinate (I think that the seeds were just too old) so I am left with a windowbox without flowers. I have been reading about what to do with daffodils once they've died and learnt that you should leave them for 6-8 weeks after they have died to allow the nutrients to return to the bulbs and so I need to think of something to do in the meantime. I thought that given my failure at attempting to grow salad leaves in a seed tray that planting some salad leaves in and around the dead daffodils might be an idea and then once the daffodils have gone it can become a fully fledged salads windowbox.

In other flower news and in light of international sunflower guerilla gardening day on Saturday our five sunflowers are looking healthy and strong.

I think that all of our plants are starting to outgrow the small pots that they are in now and have been advised that in London the frosts pass quicker than in other parts of the country and so will be starting to think about potting them on in the not too distant.

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