The potatoes are finally showing, plus other progress

Well the last few days I have been in Prague on a stag do so have had to leave my seedlings in the care of my girlfriend.

While I was going around looking like this:

My tomato plants were doing this:

I have over 50 seedlings that have started growing in there! I have no idea what I'm going to do if they all grow into full sized plants... I'm not sure my garden is big enough.

Anyway, I split them up into seed trays (ran out of trays and potting compost so this will have to be finished tomorrow when I have more trays and compost) as shown below:

In the next couple of weeks I will have to rehouse them again into bigger pots. 50 bigger pots.

Anyway, the rest of the garden has been going great guns :) and last up there is a very exciting piece of news (which you'll already know if you've read the post title)

The herb garden. The parsley and the chives are exploding!

The apple tree, with blossoms finally open.

Close up of the apple blossoms. Stunning!

The recovered chillis.Only one seedling has died! outstanding result

The Stuttgarter Giant Onions; a few additional plants have started coming up since the last update so it looks like we have a success here too

Karmen Red Onions.

Red Sun Shallots

Casablanca Garlic

And now for the big surprise, the best news of the day so far!!!!!.........

Potatoes showing some green in the old car tyre planter.

Close up of a potato in the vegetable bed.

Not many have come through, but you can see about 4 or 5 sprouting if you look REALLY closely.

So, growing successfully now we have:

Tomatoes, Chillis, 2 types of Onion, Shallots, Garlic, an apple tree and FINALLY Potatoes!  Still to show green are Parsnips and Carrots and still to be planted; Cabbage and Mushrooms.

Now I'm going to go and recover from that stag do....

Drunken gardening

So I went out last night for a few drinks and was told that there was going to be a heavy frost over night.

Obviously the major thing I was thinking about was "my apple blossom!!" so when I got home at about 12.30am I went straight into the garden and did this:

Yes. A black bin bag and some gaffa tape.

The lesson to learn here is; don't go into your garden after multiple beers.

Oh and of course there was no frost anyway :)

Sowing parsnips and carrots, plus other progress AND a frog!

It was real April weather today; one minute absolutely baking hot and the next pissing down rain.  This is probably THE most "april"ish I've ever experienced.

It did settle down into the early evening though so I was able to get out into the garden and do some planting and other things.

This is a long update so I'll get onto it now.

First of all, huge HUGE thanks to my parents for buying me a lovely mini greenhouse (another is on it's way I hope) which I assembled:

Isn't that a beautiful little greenhouse.

The chillis are finally showing so I've moved them into little planters and put them in the greenhouse

Beautiful apple blossom :) i'm SO excited by this!

A little frog that appeared hopping over the garden - it's the brown blur bottom right if you can't spot it ;)

There he is. Hopping across the prepared ground for the carrots. He made his way into the bushes at the back of the garden and disappeared. I love nature :)

The dividing line between the parsnips (left) and the carrots (right) is the two halves of my broken spade... awesome.

Here be PARSNIPS! Each stick is set to delineate a row of seeds

Your very proud host in the process of planting the carrots; here I am selecting a stick to use as a place marker for a row of seeds.

Bradato Kopele (that'd be me then) digging a trench for the seeds.

Sowing the seeds - I'm REALLY doing the splits here - it's a wide part of the bed!

Trench completed, here I'm picking up small pinches of seed to scatter

In this shot you can see the TINY seeds that I'm scattering.

Finally covering the seeds over with about 15mm of soil.

The finished bed with carrots closest and the parsnip in the distance.

Each row is about 15-20 cm apart and contains about 30 seeds across the length.


I have also planted some tomatoes into a propagator but there is NOTHING to show you so I'll not bore you with a picture of soil in small compartments.

There is still NOTHING from the potatoes - I'm checking every day.

Oh yes, and the other evening after work I managed to get 40 mins in the garden post work and did all the weeding around the herb garden, apple tree and the veg patches with onions, garlic and shallots. Everything appears to be growing very well. I am VERY excited.