January - The Parcel Arrived

Recap - January's to do list: Plant Sweet Pea and Snapdragon seeds. Previously bought Sweet Pea seeds from a garden centre and ordered a windowsill propagator and Snapdragon seeds over the Internet.

Last Wednesday my parcel arrived. It was actually time to start. I was a little disappointed that there were no instructions with the propagator but it did come with different sizes of seed modules. There are small, medium and large. I selected a medium sized module for my Sweet Peas and a small sized module for the Snapdragon seeds. I got some newspaper and laid it down. I put the modules on top of it and then filled them with the compost supplied.

On the pack of the Sweet Peas it suggested sowing them 2 to a module so that's what I did. I made a small hole and dropped two seeds into it. I did this for all the seeds in my two packs of Sweet Peas. I sowed one variety in the top most modules and the other variety in the bottom modules. The packets suggested there'd be approximately 20 seeds in each of them. There was actually 18 seeds of the Pluto variety and 24 of the Midnight variety so I can't really complain.

The Snapdragon seeds were much smaller and there was no specific instructions for using seed modules so I just sprinkled the seeds evenly on the top of the compost of a small module.

I obviously labelled the plants with the markers and pen provided and watered the seeds gently from the top. The propagator kit also came with some bumpy paper which are apparently capillary mats. I think the idea is that you put them underneath the modules, water them and they'll release water into the modules. Therefore the compost will stay moist but not sitting in water. I'll see how it goes...

January - 2 Packets of Seeds but Nowhere to Grow Them

Just a recap. My to do list for January is to plant Sweet Pea and Snapdragon seeds. I've bought two packs of Sweet Pea seeds but have nowhere to grow them and no Snapdragon seeds.

I do however have an unhealthy habit of browsing eBay and Amazon whenever I want something. You can learn a lot by typing propagator into these sites. Mainly that there's loads of different types! As with most families space is at a premium so when I saw you could get propagators to go on the windowsill I was thrilled. I was also bamboozled by whether I needed a heated one or self watering one or what. So I stopped browsing and went in search of Snapdragon seeds instead. These were much more straightforward and also solved the propagator problem.

When searching for Snapdragon seeds one of the first sites that came up was Unwins. I'd heard of them from garden centres etc. in the past. They also had a Windowsill Propagator Starter Kit that was reasonably priced. It had the actual propagator, seed modules, compost, plastic markers for labels and a pen to write on these. So everything I needed. I figured our house wasn't too cold so why did it need heating so thought I'd try this seemingly simple solution.It was duly ordered.

January -A Trip to the Local Garden Centre

On my plan for January I have a P for plant in the Sweet Pea and Snapdragon rows and a ✅ for flowering in the Snowdrops row. Last year there were some Snowdrops in the garden so I'm hoping they'll emerge again this year.

I quite like the idea of supporting local businesses so I thought the best place to buy my seeds would be our local garden centre. I also think it's quite important to get the family involved so I took my 2 kids on a walk last Monday to the garden centre with the promise of cake at the restaurant within the garden centre when we got there. It's about a 1.5 mile walk or so my husband told me after the event so it was a big ask for my 2 year old. But armed with a bag of sweets in my pocket and enthusiasm for finally starting to sort out the garden we all got there.

After cake we wondered round the garden centre. I did have a mental shopping list of obviously Sweet Pea and Snapdragon seeds, but I also needed something to grow them in and some compost. I'd also thought maybe of getting a small pop up kind of greenhouse for later on. Unfortunately, I don't know if it's because of the time of year, the garden centre seemed lacking in anything to grow seeds in and I could only find Sweet Pea seeds but it was a start. Again to involve the kids they picked a pack of Sweet Pea seeds each so we have Sweet Pea Pluto and Sweet Pea Midnight both by Kings Seeds. Pluto are supposed to be the Deepest Colour Seeds and Midnight are a Sultry Maroon in Colour.

We caught the bus back home.

Let's make plans

My next step was to go through Pippa Greenwood's book writing down all the plants she mentioned then looking them up on the RHS website to see what they looked like and if I liked them and how easily they'd be to get hold of.

In our old house I made great plans for our garden only to find I can't find any of the plants I wanted as the book was written in America and plants that are commonly available there aren't necessarily as available here. We were on a budget and for me to have the flowers I'd fallen in love with would have costed much more than we could have afforded and they probably wouldn't have survived a British winter.

Once I'd got my list I wanted to make sure we'd have something flowering in the garden all year round so I put all my chosen plants in a chart and marked on when they'd flower and when I needed to plant them. Whilst doing this I realised that I'd picked plants that I'd be able to grow from seed quite easily. My chart is below.

In the Beginning...

Ok so I'm not one for New Years resolutions but over Christmas whilst spending more time at home it occurred to me that our garden needs some tlc. We moved to our house almost a year ago and other than some half hearted weeding and pruning the bushes nothing much has been done to it. So with the help of a handy book I have downloaded to kindle, namely The Gardener's Year by Pippa Greenwood I'm hoping to transform our weed ridden sad garden into a garden full of flowers and colour.