Potting on...

... is very therapeutic. When the baby went for her afternoon nap yesterday I left one of the teenagers listening out for her and then went to shut myself in the garden room with a radio, a flask and my laundry basket full of seed paraphernalia (John Innes No.1, a box of seeds, canvas gloves, a little trowel, some tiny pots, a water spraying bottle, etc.)



It's really just the brassica that I'm bothering with potting on, because that's the only crop family that likes to have its roots disturbed on a regular basis. So I had some cabbage, cauli and brussels seedlings



to move up a size:



I must be getting old, for such a job to give me so much pleasure.

Anyway, then I just stuffed new seeds back into their places, shock horror. Is that the gardening equivalent of being a slutty housewife, I wonder? Sweeping all the dust under one's sofa? If so, guilty as charged. These plants should consider themselves lucky I'm going to the trouble of potting them on. I'm certainly not about to throw trays of good compost away and sterilise everything to start again with the next lot.

Oh dear, perhaps horticulture isn't my forté after all. Well, I've always been a bit hit and miss with it all. The main thing, in my opinion, is that it should be rewarding and enjoyable. When it starts being a pain in the neck, it's gone too far I think.

The tomato, courgette and butternut squash seeds aren't doing a thing yet. I think it must be too cold out there for them to germinate, so we'll just have to wait for the weather to warm up I suppose, because to try and heat our garden room would be like heating the sky.

Planting progress

So far we've got tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes, spring onions, cabbage, cauliflower, beetroot and brussel sprouts planted indoors, in the garden room. (The garden room is the back two-thirds of our old Grimston garage, with a new[ish] perspex roof and doors, the back of which opens out into the little garden behind, hence its name.)



The cabbages have sprouted already! We're just running out of space in there now, because it has to house so much else besides plant pots:



We also put a raspberry cane in the old bathtub, to go with the strawberries already in there:



And on the house windowsills we've got potatoes chitting, just waiting for the last of the frost (who knows when that might be..?) to go into the field, where we planted some much hardier broad beans with friends a couple of weeks ago. We'll intercrop peas with those, devote a whole plot to potatoes then plot three will take the leaf crops when we've done all the fussy potting on that they like so much. The carrot seeds, beetroot seedlings and onions will go straight into the fourth bed - when I've finished digging it! I'm terribly late with that one, but have torn a 'digging' muscle in my calf, so am putting it off for yet another week or two. I can't do much to condition the soil in that except add some sand and some bonemeal and hope for the best.



Finally, I treated myself to some globe artichoke and asparagus plants, which need a special perennial bed building for them in the field. "Will you be able to protect them from the wind?" asked a visitor at the weekend. The short answer to that is "No." They'll have to take their chances, with everything else out there. Only the tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and whatever else is found space for in the garden room will be protected from that. We're nothing if not hopeful.