Garden Bear's World - Sowing our first Seeds of 2021

 

Last week, Polar and I decided to sow some seeds.  We don't usually start things so early, but this is an experiment.  Polar wants to start her leeks early, to try to beat the allium leaf miner bug, and would like earlier home-grown tomatoes, if possible.

However, the first thing we needed was some seed compost.  Polar's home-made compost is fine for bigger plants but not for seed-sowing, as there are already some weed seeds in it, and it might be hard to separate the seedlings we want from the ones we don't.  

 Because of the nasty virus, she didn't want to go shopping for some, but she didn't want a delivery person to have to carry a big sack of compost down the path either.  So she ordered some coir bricks.  These were nice and light for the postie to carry, but I didn't think they would give us very much compost.

'I think you'll be surprised, Endon,' said Polar.

We put one of the bricks in a big plastic trug and Polar poured a whole pint of water over it.  Soon, it had soaked up all the water, so Polar poured another pint of water over it.

This time, I could see the brick starting to swell up.  Polar prodded it with her hand fork and started breaking it into pieces, adding even more water but gradually, so the coir didn't get saturated.  Eventually, all the dry lumps had been broken up and we had lots of lovely, fluffy coir compost, which smells really nice too.

Polar brought some packets of seed into the kitchen and I fetched a mushroom box and the packaging from some veggie mince to make a seed tray and propagator lid.

We put a sheet of kitchen paper inside the mushroom box to help keep the light out, then filled it with our coir compost.  Polar pressed it down nice and firmly, then we put six seeds each of our tomatoes on top.

Then we sprinkled a thin layer of vermiculite over the top and made some labels, to remind us which seeds were which and when we had sowed them.  Then we watered them gently and put them on a sunny window sill in the warm living-room.

After we sowed the tomatoes, we filled another tray and sowed some basil seeds, hoping we can get an early crop of this delicious herb.

Finally, we sowed some leeks and some rocket, again using our recycled trays.  After we had put the vermiculite on them and watered them, Polar took these out to the greenhouse.

Despite filling four mushroom trays, I was amazed to see that we still had a big tub of compost left.

There was just one job left to do - it was time to clean up the kitchen!  Oh dear...