It's all about Seeds

This is my Garden Share Collective post for October, which this month has a theme - SEEDS

It's very timely for now it is time in our garden to prepare for the growing season by starting off seeds in trays ready for later spring planting.

My motherinlaw and I spent the afternoon with packets of seedling mix and our seed stash, starting off seeds in trays.  We have decided (or rather, she decided) that the old pigpen would be a good raising place, since it gets sun, and is warm, but seeds wont be damaged by late frosts.  In the absence of a potting shed or garden shed, I concurred.

We had quite a little conveyor belt system going, she put in the mix, I watered and put in seeds, then she topped with a small sprinkle and named the tray.

Now we have quite a collection of filled trays.

Our working table, this was the first few trays we potted up

The first of the trays on the pigpen floor

I did have to laugh about the seed collection we had.  Both of us had saved seed from plants last year, but invariably we had the same foods, always Spring Onion - I guess because it produces such a prolific amount of seed.   I found I had lots of little folded envelopes and packets marked things like, "Anna Lettuce - nice 2010" etc.  Will they still be viable? I don't know, but time will tell.  In a couple of weeks if they haven't germinated we'll try again.

Kale seedlings in the main garden, from seed I collected last Autumn

A note to YATES - the seed packets were so sparse with seed. Shame on you YATES.  We counted and planted only 19 seeds from the packet of "Summerstar" tomatoes.  Gone are the days when you got a good few tablespoons of seed in a bought packet.  Oderings gave the best value for money, with goodly numbers of seeds in their packets.

With only 19 seeds in this packet, it is hardly value for money!

A Chicken Adventure

One of our chickens went missing this week.  It didn't come home at bedtime and I assumed it had been taken by a hawk.

Two days later look what Mark found.  Miss Chicken had fallen down between some stacked giboard . She came out all wobbly and flat on one side. But so far she is still alive and seems to be making a recovery!

It must be Spring

We have had a week if on/off rain which i hope breaks our drought...daffodils and rain are noth wonderful!

How (not) to Grow Mushrooms

Step one:  buy your Mushroom Kit (in this case "Mushroom Gourmet") with memories of kits kept in cupboards while flatting in Sydney, which once watered produced a plethora of mushrooms.

Step two: Keeping those memories alive, open the box (easy) and start to read the 6 pages of instructions (hard).

Step three: take a small nap to recover, then tackle the first page of the instructions.

EIGHT WEEKS LATER: Moan and bitch at everyone that it didn't work