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!

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.

The trials and errors of a first time gardener...

I knew it was all too good to be true. I didn't know what I was doing, I planted a whole load of seeds and they grew! Surely such luck could not last. And so the first of my gardening failures are springing up (or wilting down more to the point). I was convinced after reading a few articles on growing salads and then reading Elevated Agriculture's very comprehensive guide to planting windowsill lettuces that the seed trays I had tried to start off some early rocket and spinach in would be too shallow and so, 3 weeks after planting the spinach and 5 after planting the rocket they have completely wilted up and keeled over. It all happened quite quickly too - in the space of a few days they went from being healthy looking little plants to being shrivelled and dead. Still... in our trip to the garden centre last weekend we bought our deeper pots for the window ledges so once we pot them up hopefully we can get some salad leaves going in them.

And our once strong nasturtiums also seem to have taken a turn for the worse. Most of them are still looking ok but a couple of them are starting to get shrivelled leaves. Could this be a sign that they have outgrown the pots that they're in? This specimen has been the only one to have stripy leaves the whole time so I thought that it was just a colour variation but now I'm wondering whether it has been slightly sickly all along. Also having heard that often nasturtium seeds are planted straight in the ground in May I'm thinking that starting them off in pots might not have been the best idea for them after all.

It wasn't the best weekend in the kitchen either. I attempted to make fudge for the first time and somehow ended up with a very sticky toffee instead which unfortunately couldn't be salvaged and ended up in a ball in the bin. It was supposed to be for a present, I had brought all lovely ribbon and organza to wrap up little parcels of sweets in although luckily I'd had the foresight to plan a few different parcels and the coconut ice and shortbread recipes worked much better so all was not lost!

And as they say - the best lesson is to learn from your mistakes!

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...

To pot or not to pot...

Well the tomatoes and the nasturtiums seem to be coming on like wildfire at the moment and the spinach has absolutely shot up since this morning.

The tomatoes and the nasturtiums have got to the stage now though when I'm wondering how long they can stay in the pots they are in. For space issues inside I'd quite like to be able to go straight from the pots they're in out to the windowboxes but is it still to cold and early for them to brave the outside? For tomatoes I have read everything from early May to late June but have also heard of some people putting their tomatoes outside from mid-April so I'm not sure what to do! Also, before fully transplanting them into outdoor windowboxes do we need to acclimatise them to outside a bit at a time or will they be ok if they go straight out? From a bit of nasturtium research it seems that they would probably be ok to go outside straight away (and they are getting a little unruly on the table!) but would it be ok plant them in a window box now that we then add more to later?

Outside on the kitchen windowsill the last of our three types of daffodil is looking like it will burst into flower any day. And these ones will have multiple flowers from one stem which I'm looking forward to seeing.

A sunny windowsill weekend

Well I've had a few days off the blog but over the weekend we decided to put the five herb pots out on the windowsill for a while whilst it was really sunny to see how they fared. They've been doing ok (and the basil seems to have perked up since I stopped watering it so much - thanks for the tips!) but what seems to have happened is that they've hit a bit of a stage where they don't seem to be getting any bigger particularly quickly so I thought some time out in the sun might do them some good. Unfortunately for the coriander by the time it was brought back in again it seemed to have flopped over completely. I'm not quite sure what to do about it to get the stalks stronger so that they can support the weight of the leaves. In the other pots I keep thinking that some day the skinny little chives are going to be getting a bit thicker but they don't seem to be showing any signs of that yet. The parsley seems to be doing ok, I was worried before that only one of our seeds had germinated but then I was informed that parsley always takes ages to germinate and since then we've had two more seedlings so things are on the up! And last but not least the mint still seems to be lingering behind as lots of very small little plants. So a bit of a hotch-potch with the lot of them but any advice on what these herbs should be looking like nearly two months after sowing would be much appreciated!

In other exciting news the spinach seeds that I sowed a week ago are starting to pop their heads up which is fantastic.

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?