Sowing the first seeds of 2012

Today it is freezing cold up here in North Staffs, dull and overcast, and we've had snow - not huge amounts, but enough to be a shock after such a mild winter.  Putting out some bird feed this morning, I noticed clusters of ladybirds sheltering in the leaves of my small pot-grown olive tree, so gathered the little critters up and moved them into the greenhouse, where hopefully they will find somewhere warmer to spend these frosty nights.

Yesterday, in the sunshine, the greenhouse was fabulously warm despite the cold temperatures outside, and I made a start on sowing some seeds.  Although they can be direct sown, I always start my broad beans off indoors, as our soil can be too wet to work early in the spring, and have devised a good home-made, recycled "root-trainer" type system from small supermarket mushroom containers, which are precisely the right size to hold 6 cardboard toilet-roll tubes (or half kitchen-roll tubes).  The tubes stand upright in the mushroom tray, are filled with compost to within about 2cm of the top (multipurpose will do for big seeds like broad beans).  The seed beans then go in and are covered with more compost, and while germination is awaited, another mushroom tray sits over the top of the tubes to make sure the beans aren't robbed out by mice. 

When it's warm enough to open the greenhouse and take a photo of this cunning contraption, I'll add it here.

There it is - shown left, with six tubes fitted in perfectly, and right with rodent-proof lid!  Small wood-mice occasionally sneak into the greenhouse and in previous years have excavated the beans out of the tubes for winter food - starting the beans indoors solved this, but tended to produce rather leggy, soft plants which even after hardening off didn't appreciate moving out into the garden when there was still frost about. Once the beans have germinated, the mice seem not to be interested, so the lid can (indeed must) come off, though a clear plastic cover can replace it for things which need more warmth than broad beans.

This design also works for runner and French beans, or sweet peas - the cardboard tube is simply planted out with the plant when the time comes and in time rots away.  The only problems I've found are that as the tubes are both absorbent and porous, you need to ensure adequate watering, and occasionally small fungi grow on the outside of the tubes, though with no detriment to the beans in my experience.

I've also sown the first couple of batches of salad leaves, also using recycled supermarket packaging as seed trays.  I do have seed trays, but have to confess to getting a small, geeky buzz from finding a use for stuff which would otherwise go for landfill.  The mushroom trays combine really well, for example, with the deeper clear plastic trays supermarkets often sell smaller joints of meat in to make neat little propagators which are great for raising small numbers of tomato and pepper seeds, herbs (like basil) and half-hardy annuals as they fit perfectly on the window sill.

I start my spring-planted onion sets off indoors these days too, using conventional module trays.  Allowing them to make some roots before planting out seems to minimise that annoying problem of birds pulling them out of the soil (possibly mistaking the tips of the dry outer leaves for worms), as they get well fastened-in to the soil much more quickly.

This year's seed compost is New Horizon Organic and Peat Free, as I haven't been able to find the dehydrated coir blocks used last year, very successfully, for sale in any of the local garden centres so far this year, but did find this compost (which certaily feels nice and handles well - germination report to follow when it happens) for sale in the Wilkinsons store in Hanley at a very reasonable price.

So with seeds sown, although it now looks very much like winter out there, to me it feels like spring!