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!

Seeds!

I have just ordered my seeds for the 2012 windowboxes. I am slightly later this year than I have been for the past two but hoping that this won't cause any problems... As some of you will be aware one of my "30 before 30" for this year is to grow an aubergine on the windowsill. This may be a tall order but I'm hoping that I'll be able to do it. The variety that I have gone for is the dwarf "Ophelia" plant. Fingers crossed they like sunny spots and will thrive on the windowsill. Only time will tell. To go alongside the aubergines I've gone for another newby to the windowsill - the dwarf runner bean "Hestia" and last but not least I have the old favourites which have done very well both years - tumbling tomatoes and some chilli seeds (another new variety of chilli this year - going to try Caldero).

Now just got to sit back and wait for them to arrive in the post!

Prarie fire and jalapenos

The Wahaca chillies did so well last year that I've bought some more chilli seeds. Last year we had serrano's and I think another trip to Wahaca is in order so I can pick myself up some more seeds but in the mean time I did a bit of chilli ordering from the guys at the South Devon Chilli Farm. I was in need of some dried chipotles to make chipotles en adobo and I thought that whilst I was paying for postage and packing I may as well pick up some seeds.

So... I bought some prarie fire which are really pretty little plants that you can keep inside in pots and some jalapenos as they're used in loads of recipes and you can never find them in the shops. However, I'm not quite sure how windowsill friendly the jalapenos will be so that may have been a mistake if they start shooting up... We'll see!

Disillusioned

As a novice gardener in her first year of gardening I was becoming a bit disillusioned - the excitement of the spring and summer when new things seemed to be happening every day had passed and the plants just seemed to be on a slow decline to death. I'd been walking past them and rather than getting the joy of earlier months I was getting a sinking feeling as they just started to look more and more dead every day.




But the other day I decided to pick myself up and have a proper look at them all and look for the positives - we had lots of bright red chillies and tomatoes just waiting to be picked and the oregano still seems to be coming on great guns.









We also had no food in the house for dinner and had just got back from a trip away so the fact that we had these bright juicy fat red chillies and tomatoes just crying out to be picked was a great little present. So I heated up the hob and chucked four of the chillies in the pan to blacken them all over. Then in went the tomatoes along with some chopped spring onions, garlic and the finely chopped stalks of a bunch of parsley that I found lying around in the fridge. Meanwhile I got a big pot of boiling water on the go to cook some pasta in. Once all of the veggies had fried down a bit I bashed up the chillies, added a tin of chopped tomatoes and a tin of drained chickpeas and left it all to simmer away while the pasta cooked. Once the pasta was done I added a ladelful of the pasta water to the sauce, chucked the pasta in and stirred it around along with the chopped parsley leaves and salt and pepper to taste. A perfect meal inspired by the windowsill and the store cupboard!

Cabbage white butterfly eggs

A few days ago I noticed that some more eggs had been laid on one of our chilli plants. Following an internet search I think that they must be the eggs of a cabbage white butterfly. All of the blogs that I have read on these say that you should destroy the eggs, rubbing them off with soapy water but I like the idea of encouraging biodiversity through our windowsills and don't really want to go around killing eggs. Is this a really bad idea and will the caterpillars end up munching right through our windowbox?

It also seems that it must have been quite a confused butterfly that laid it's eggs there. From the information on the British Butterfly Conservaton Society's website the eggs are normally laid either on brassicas or on nasturtiums or wild mignonette. So a serrano chilli plant seems a little far removed from any of them!

Homemade harissa

One of the chillies out on the windowsill is starting to change colour which reminds me that I never blogged about what we did with our first chilli harvest a few weeks back now.

We had four bright red, windowsill grown chillies just waiting to be cooked with something tasty and so we decided to make harissa paste with them. Unfortunately it is a tale much like the cherry tomatoes of the other night where to make the harissa you need 250g of chillies (great for those of you out there with heaving chilli plants!). This is slightly more than four so our trusty chillies were added in with some others.

The recipe that I used was out of the Moro cookbook and it says that it will last in the fridge for a couple of weeks. So to make the paste you have to cut the chillies in half and remove the seeds. Then you blend them in a food processor with ground caraway seeds and cumin seeds, 4 cloves of garlic and a pinch of salt. Then add a roasted, skinned and seeded red bell pepper and blitz again until smooth. Once it's smooth stir in a dessertspoon of tomato puree, a dessertspoon of red wine vinegar, two level teaspoons of sweet smoked paprika and six tablespoons of olive oil. And there you have it!

We then took our homemade harissa paste and used it to make harissa roast chicken (see p217 of the Moro cookbook) accompanied with fried potatoes (p232). Absolutely gorgeous!

Indoor chillies: Outdoor chillies

We've been noticing a funny phenomenon in our windowsill chillies. The chillies that are outside on the windowsill appear to have grown in a completely different shape to the ones that we've had to keep inside on the table as there wasn't enough space out on the windowsill. The ones outside are long and skinny whilst the ones inside are short and fat.

It could be the temperature difference, or it could be the difference in pot sizes (the ones inside are still in those tiny pots that we initially transplanted them into).

Anyone else noticed this type of phenomenon and have any idea why it has happened?

Feeling hot, hot, hot!

Look at our chillies now! From being completely green a week ago, to starting to see red patches on Thursday, they are now bright red all over!

I never realised that when they turned red it would happen so quickly. You can see them shining out now in all their red glory when you're walking back down the road - puts a smile on my face every time.

Verdict: Wahaca chilli seeds - success!

A shade of red

I should blog about my discontent with the plants more often... Check this out!

Just 4 days after I blogged about the lack of progress with the chillies changing colour, tonight we have realised that two of our chillies are on the turn. So despite the fact that it has been pretty much pouring in London all week the chillies are battling on through and getting on with getting red anyway. That's made my day. Fantastic!

A few more sunny days like today is what we need!

If only the weather could stay sunny like it is today. Then maybe my poor green chillies would have more of a hope of turning red at some point soon. They are all looking very healthy and now all, bar one of my plants have got several chillies on them each (even the ones that I've had to keep indoors!) but they are all still staying resolutely green with not even the tiniest hint of redness coming out yet.

Being entirely new to this gardening malarkey I have no idea how long I should be expecting to wait for chillies (or peppers in general I guess?) to turn red. Can anyone offer me any advice as to how long these things normally take? The three chillies that have been around for the longest don't seem to have changed at all in three or four weeks now since they stopped getting any bigger but they are still showing no signs of changing colour...

Itsy bitsy spider

We had a spider visitor to the windowsill the other day. I think that it was a male garden spider (Araneus diadematus) although if you think otherwise then please let me know! It never ceases to amaze me how much wildlife actually manages to find its way up onto our windowsill considering it's only a few small plants but it's wonderful none-the-less. Here you can see one of the chillies on the chilli plant that was placed outside a few weeks ago. That plant has now got six little chillies coming along on it. Still waiting for the big chillies to even look slightly like they are going to start turning red though... They are still looking green as a cucumber!

Windfall chilli enchiladas!

Well the chillies that managed to survive the winds are going strong still out in the occasional patches of sunshine that we've had this week but the windfall chilli met a good end too. As the chilli seeds originally came from Wahaca it seemed right that our first chilli produce should be used in a recipe from Thomasina Miers' new book Mexican Food Made Simple and so chicken and tomato enchiladas it was!


The chillies go into the smoky tomato sauce and to make that you quarter an onion, peel four garlic cloves and blacken them in a dry frying pan along with two chillies and twelve tomatoes.


You want everything to get really blackened and the skins of the chillies and tomatoes to be bubbling and blistering. Once things are going nice and black remove them from the frying pan. They won't all cook at the same speed so some will need removing earlier than others. Once they're all out of the frying pan, peel the skins off the chillies and tomatoes and remove the chilli stalks and then blitz the lot in a food processor to get a lovely sauce. Add to this a good glug of red wine vinegar and then place in a saucepan and allow to reduce for half an hour or so. When it has reduced nicely, add a handful of chopped tarragon and chervil along with a teaspoonful of demerera sugar and some salt and pepper. Separate your sauce into two halves. Shred the meat off half a pre-cooked chicken and stir that into one half of the sauce.

Now it's time to make up the enchiladas. Pour enough of the sauce into the bottom of an oven-proof dish to cover it. Get your corn tortillas one by one, fill them with the chicken mixture, roll them up and place them in a line in the dish as you would with canneloni. Once you've got them all snugly fitting in the dish and have used up all your filling pour the remaining tomato sauce over the top. Then cover this with a good layer of sour cream and finally top off with grated cheese. Place in a pre-heated oven on 180 degrees for 40 minutes. Sit back and relax with a glass of wine while it cooks.

the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees...

Over the weekend life out on the windowsill has been positively buzzing. Yesterday one of our tomato plants was visited by a green stink bug. A little bit of Googling enlightened me to the very interesting story of Nezara viridula, which is an invasive species that was found in the UK for the first time six years ago and apparently now has a well established population in London. The bug is an African native but arrived over here as a stowaway in shipments of fruit and veg and has now been able to establish itself as a full-time UK resident due to the warmer weather we are receiving as a result of climate change.

Meanwhile over on the chilli plants we noticed a little cluster of orange eggs on the underside of one of the leaves. Turns out that these are ladybird eggs and a little later in the day there was a ladybird wandering across the plant. I wonder if it had come back to watch over it's brood...


And last but not least earlier on today I glimpsed some pollination in action with a bumblebee visitor to our tomato plant visiting each of the yellow flowers one by one. I've been trying to identify him using the ID guides on the Bumblebee Conservation Trust website but am finding it rather tricky. If anyone can help me out with the identification that would be great. All in all though I'm very encouraged that even the small number of plants on our three tiny windowsills are doing their bit to help in the fight to save our bees and that the great pest-munching ladybirds are loving our windowsill garden as well.

Some like it hot! (and some not so much)

Well as London has been basking for days 30 degree heat our south-facing sunny windowsill has been taking a battering! So long as they get their water twice a day the chillies and the tomatoes are loving the heat and we've now got five growing chillies and I've counted six tomatoes although it's tricky to see them so there may be more. In exciting news on the chilli front I was surfing around the other day and discovered that the kind people at Wahaca had linked through to my blog update on the chillies from their Facebook page. Rather a shock to see my blog in amongst all their other news but a pleasant suprise none-the-less!



Unfortunately the salad leaves are not enjoying the full sunshine so much and are completley frazzled, with just a couple of the rocket plants still fighting on. I guess full sunlight for the whole day is just too much for salad leaves and equally the nasturtiums seem to be shrivelling up a bit as well. As for the sunflowers, they died a good few weeks back now and I still haven't got around to doing anything with them so parts of the windowsill are looking a little sorry for themselves at the moment.





Back inside the flat, our two troughs with tomato plants, sweet peppers and chillies that we've had in the fireplace are starting to take over the floor. Unlike the ones on the windowsill the plants have gone much more straggly in a bid to grow towards the light, the tomato plants in particular just aren't producing any flowers and despite my best efforts at cross-pollination on the sweet pepper and chilli I don't seem to be having any luck. So because of this, and because the salad isn't working and the sunflowers are now long gone I think we're going to have a switch around and get the troughs in the fireplace outside. A job for tomorrow!

Wahaca-ca-ca

Well the flowers did indeed lead to fruits and one of our Wahaca chilli plants is now the bearer of one huge serrano chilli and a further four smaller ones that are growing bigger and bigger by the day. I'm so chuffed that all my worries about the coldness of the flat back in February and the fact that they hadn't been under heaters hasn't stopped them from being able to produce fruits.



Only two of the six plants that we've got left (I gave two of them away to other homes) are currently out on the windowsill but both of those are reaping the rewards of the gorgeous long sunny days that we've been having over the past couple of weeks. Three of them are still in the tiny little pots that we transplanted them into from the seed trays and they really need some more root space but it's finding the space in the flat to put them that's the problem!

Blooming marvellous!

Another week away from the windowsill and so much has been coming on with the green foliage taking over more and more space every day. The most exciting thing is that one of the chilli plants that is outside has started to flower so I'm really hoping that flowers will lead to fruits and we'll have some serrano chillis to look forward to later in the year.

The salad leaves that we planted in the old daffodil window box are also coming along nicely and looking much stronger than the little sickly ones that I attempted earlier in the year in the seed trays.

Windowsill gardening at last!

Well at long last this weekend we managed to get around to actually planting the plants out in their troughs and the majority of them are now actually living out on the windowsill. Outside the kitchen window I've transplanted the mint into a much larger pot and am hoping that the plants will get stronger and larger now that they've got more space to move. I also have the trough out on that windowsill that the daffodils were in - nearly all of the daffodil foliage had completely died back so I cut nearly all of it down and have planted a row of nasturtiums at the front, rocket behind and spinach behind that. Hopefully with the leaves in a deeper tray I'll have more luck than last time...



Then on the two living room windowsills I've got two pots that each have a chilli in the middle and nasturtiums round the edge; one trough with the five sunflowers in and I've stuck in some nasturtium seeds in front of them and one trough with some tomatoes in.










I've also split the chives and the basil plants into more bigger pots (although kept them inside) as they didn't seem to be getting any bigger. And in an attempt to get our table back so we have somewhere to eat once more we have moved the two indoor troughs that we planted up a while back to the fireplace although I'm worried that they might not get enough sun there so will monitor them and see how they do...



All in all a good weekend!

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 a difference some sun makes

I've been away from the windowsills with work for the past couple of days and it's absolutely amazing how much everything has shot up with the arrival of some sun. Our two lines of rocket that we planted have popped their heads up and most of the Wahaca chillies now have two plants growing in the seed plugs. Now that we've got some more compost I think that we need to start getting on with repotting the tomatoes which have also shot up over the past couple of days.

In other news out on the kitchen windowsill the second of our daffodils has also come into bloom.