First seeds of 2013

So I've sowed my first seeds of 2013. This year I've been doing quite a bit of reading about gardening in general and what I should be doing when. I'm trying very hard not to get too excited about all the new found space we have and keep things relatively simple and so for this year we have decided not to do too much with the main portion of the garden and keep all of our vegetable growing within hanging baskets and pots on the patio. This should mean we're able to have a lot more growing space than we have done in previous years but will hopefully not be such a big step up that we're overwhelmed by everything we have to do and have too much to learn.

Cocktail stick labels for my seedlings ready to go

Therefore, again with the seeds for this year we've stuck with only buying ones which are recommended for containers although we have allowed ourselves some bigger crops (such as sweetcorn, courgette and squash!) than we've previously had on the windowsill. I'm also keen to get a herb garden established so we've bought a selection of herb seeds.

First set of seeds planted and labelled up with sowing date

Last Monday I set about sowing the first set. In my reading I'd seen that it is recommended that rather than sow all of your seeds at once you sow over successive weeks to spread out your harvest better throughout the year and so taking this into account I started with just sowing a couple of each of the seeds. I still had some seeds left over from last year (aubergines, caldero chillies, a packet of Wahaca chilli seeds that I'd picked up at some point along the way) so I shoved them in some seed compost to see if they'll do anything and then I started to plant up a few of the seeds that I've bought for this year so planted some red and yellow tumbling tomatoes, chervil, rosemary and thyme. I've read that it's really hard to get rosemary and thyme to germinate so fingers crossed!

Thyme seeds planted - fingers crossed they germinate!

We also no longer have our lovely dining table sitting in a south facing window just perfect for germinating seeds that we had in the flat so I've resorted to using the bed in the spare room having protected the mattress with a dust sheet and put a couple of spare table tops on top of it. The window is west facing which is the best I can do so we'll see how it goes...

Using the bed in the spare room as a surface for seedlings!

January tomatoes

The window boxes did become casualties of all of the activity surrounding the wedding and honeymoon in the latter half of 2011 and as such got rather left to their own devices for the last quarter of the year.

However, one of the upsides of this is that with the mild winter all of the green tomatoes that were left on the tomato plants have been gradually turning red throughout December and January and every week or so we get another 15-20 red tomatoes to put into our dinner. My new favourite cookbook is Plenty by Yottam Ottolenghi and I used this lot in his Lentil and Aubergine recipe.

Very tasty indeed!

Out with the old and in with the new!

Well over the weekend I took the opportunity to do some tidying up and armed with all of your suggestions from the other week headed off to the garden centre in search of some winter windowsill produce. I managed to get hold of some garlic, winter salad leaves, sping onions and cos lettuces which all said that they were ok to be planted at this time of year and I also picked up some cress and mustard too to keep me busy.

When I got back I spent some time pottering around and cleared out one of the windowsills where all of the former tomato plants were dead (I have left a little clump of oregano which was clinging on for dear life in the hope that it is going to revive itself) and in their place I have planted a row of the winter leaves and a row of the spring onions. It didn't mention anything on the label about starting them off inside so I have just planted them straight into the windowbox outside (not sure if this was a good idea or not!?!). Then I also removed the chilli plant which had only produced one short fat chilli and have planted three cloves of garlic in its place. Am looking forward to seeing whether anything sprouts or not!



I've left the other two windowboxes for the time being - one of them is still bursting with chillies and to keep them fresh I don't want to be picking them until we need them and the other one has lots of tomatoes that are a yellowish colour at the moment so I'm clinging on in the vain hope that they might turn red for me some day soon. I've also left the pot of mint in place and tidied it up removing all of the dead stalks and it's sprung back to life amazingly!

Chilli leaves

Today I'd like to post about something that I've been wondering about for a week or so... why do all of the leaves on my chilli plants appear to have one big leaf at the back and then a small leaf at the front? Presumably it must have something to do with catching as much sunlight as possible but I can't see why that would mean that the one at the front would be so much smaller... Is this a common trait in chilli plants or are my ones abnormal?

In other windowsill news the spinach leaves are growing longer and longer by the day. I'm wondering what is going to happen to them, whether they are just going to keep on elongating or if the plants will be getting extra leaves some time...

Taking stock...

Well I've finally got around to transferring the chillis and the sweet pepper out from the seed tray and into some pots. Hopefully now they've got a bit more space they'll continue to thrive and start getting a bit larger. One of the chillis is looking a little sickly and it's leaves are curled up but it was previously sharing a seed plug with another plant so maybe now it's got a whole pot to itself it will perk up a bit. So in the windowsill garden stock take the grand total of the fruits of our labour in terms of the seed tray that we planted back on 6th March is:
8 tumbling tomato plants (Lycopersicon lycopersicum);
8 serrano chillis;
1 sweet pepper (Capsicum annum);
5 pots of Greek oregano (Origanum vulgare);
5 dwarf sunflowers (Helianthus annus);
10 nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus).

In addition to that we've got the other herb pots from the seed mats (basil, coriander, chives, curly parsley and mint) and the seed tray of salad leaves. As well as potting out the remaining plants I've also just added some spinach seeds (Lazio F1) to the seed tray with the rocket so looking forward to some tasty leaves...

As only one of the five sweet pepper seeds that we planted germinated I'm quite tempted to have another go at planting some more. Is it advisable to chuck away the seed tray that has just been vacated by all of the other plants or if I give it a good wash would I be ok to repot it with some more sweet pepper seeds?

What to do with the coriander and basil...?

The herb pots have been on the go for about a month now but I'm getting a little worried about the coriander and basil pots. I think that we might need to thin out the coriander as it has gone a little haywire and the stems are all very floppy and unable to support the weight of the leaves. I was wondering whether anyone had any advice on whether it will be possible to pull out and repot some of the individual plants or if that is likely to be tricky - they were grown from "seed mats". Are seed mats usually designed for the seeds to be spaced far enough apart that they shouldn't need thinning or not?

As for the basil, it just seems to be looking a little on the yellow side rather than the bright green that I was expecting. Might this be because the compost is running out of nutrients? I wasn't expecting that to happen so quickly so am thinking that probably isn't the case but can't think what else it might be unless it is also an overcrowding issue.

Any thoughts?

Out of compost!

Well we've had a good stab at potting up the plants from the seed tray. I thought that it would be good to repot the nasturtiums, the stronger of the sunflowers, the oregano and the tomatoes. However, we ran out of compost about half way through. So the tomatoes and some of the oregano are still in the seed trays for the moment.

It's amazing how much space everything takes up once it's potted out though... Now about half of our dining table has been taken over with pots! I'm also a little worried that when we did the repotting we might have disturbed the roots a bit too much (the soil all fell apart rather than staying in tight plugs) but I figure that it's still early in the year and we're learning as we go so if we lose a few now we've still got time to plant more up.

We also did a little more sowing and have now got a seed tray with two lines of rocket seeds in it. Looking forward to some yummy homegrown salads very shortly!

Not too cold for the peppers and chillies!

Well I had resigned myself to the fact that we weren't going to get any germinating chillies or peppers because we hadn't made it warm enough for them.

When we had planted the seed tray up we hadn't realised that people normally either place them on radiators or under propagating lamps to get them to germinate and hence had planted them with a row of tomatoes in between. However, lo and behold, this morning when I went to check the tray we've got a little pepper plant and three chillies that have all come up at the same time!

In other news it appears that one of the sunflowers that was drooping yesterday has started to fight back a little but the another one has begun to wilt. So now we've got two healthy sunflowers and three that are not looking so good. Today we will pot them up!

Busy times on the windowsill...

Well the internet's been down for a few days so there's been no blog action since the weekend but that hasn't stopped the activity on the windowsill. Two of the daffodils are developing buds so I'm hoping that they're going to spring into flower any day soon, the coriander has developed it's first coriander shaped leaves, the nasturtiums have absolutely shot up and we've now got six little tomato seedlings too that seem to be doing fantastically.

Parsley and mint!

Well over the last couple of days since we did all of the planting the parsley and mint have sprouted so now we've got our full complement of herbs from the seeds we planted in pots a few weekends ago! At the moment we've got just one solitary parsley plant and several absolutely tiny mint plants. Meanwhile the coriander continues to shoot up and the chives are going from strength to strength...

Wahaca chillis

So the chillis that we have planted are serrano chillies are from a matchbook that came free of charge when we paid the bill following a very tasty meal at Wahaca. Hoping for great things and that as well as the lovely dinner that we had there, we've got many more lovely dinners to come from our chilli crop.

Slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails

I do have a little previous gardening experience... A couple of years ago I spent a year living up in a little town called Menai Bridge in Anglesey. We had a lovely house that looked right out over the Menai Strait and when the summer came we were excited at the prospect of getting out in the garden and growing our own fruit and vegetables. Keen and eager we got in the grow bags and planted them up with salad leaves, tomatoes, courgettes and strawberries.

All were doing fabulously and then the slugs hit! With a dog living next door we didn't want to put down and slug pellets. But no matter what we tried they kept on coming back - beer, cracked egg shells and straw just couldn't stop the power of the Anglesey slug population and we ended up losing nearly all our lovely produce! Due to my distress and disbelief at the sheer number of slugs that there could be in one small garden my boyfriend bought me the fabulous book "50 ways to kill a slug" to bring a smile to my face.

I'm keeping my fingers and toes crossed for better luck this year and that we won't get too many slugs up in the windowsill garden!

Two weekends ago

We were lucky enough to be given for Christmas by my boyfriend's brother a starter kit for getting going with our edible window boxes. Goodies included some window troughs, seed trays, a trowel and seeds to get us going on a "pizza and pasta pot". Two weekends ago we planted up some of the herb seed mats in little pots.


We left them covered in clingfilm on the table by the window and 11 days later the basil, coriander and chives have popped their heads up! As of yet there's still no sign of the parsley or mint... Fingers crossed they're just taking their time.

How it all began...

A keen cook, inspired by Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook and Nigel Slater's Tender, I have decided in 2010 to see how much I can grow on three sunny windowsills in my first floor London flat. Fully armed with seeds, pots and plenty of enthusiasm I intend to chart my successes and no doubt failures on these pages and hope to get a tasty meal or two at the end of it!