My week in sowing 4 - Peas, carrots and peppers

Home grown produce, can't wait!

This week for me has been all about the vegetables.  My garage windowsill is still stuffed and nothing shows any sign of wishing to move out any time soon, so this week I again am focussing on more hardy souls, like peas.

Sugar Snap Peas - Jessy.  I didn't sow my own sugar snaps last year, I cheated and bought them from the garden centre.  This did not turn out as well as you might have imagined.  The peas are sowed commercially more than one to a cell, and I didn't get them planted out quick enough so by the time I did I couldn't get them separated.  I was pretty brutal with them, but in the end had to plant them in clusters. This did not aid picking as I couldn't see the things amongst the thicket of vines.  This year Im doing it myself.  Im going to have a lot less plants to work with, but they will hopefully not be such an unruly bunch.  Currently I have sown 15 peas, but I might do a second crop to keep the peas rolling in during the summer.  I think peas are fairly unfussy, so I sowed them in normal compost in one of my segmented plastic trays.  They like to go in two inches deep, but the cells are not much deeper, so they have to make do with an inch and a half.

Pea - Kelvedon Wonder. I did grow these last year, and they were a roaring success; big, juicy, succulant.  Or at least the slugs thought so.  They dived in promptly the moment the leaves had appeared.  I saved most of them, but this year I will be on it right from the start.  Being only a different type of pea I sowed them in exactly the same way as the sugar snaps.  Both are outside braving it, protected by some fleece at night.

Small and perfectly formed, Bugs Bunny would be proud.  Ok maybe I wouldn't mind them a tad bigger

Carrot - Chanteray Red Cored 2.  I loved growing carrots last year, can't remember exactly eating a huge amount, but thats hardly the point!  Its all about the growing in my book, especially as carrots take so little effort.  I do not have the right soil for carrots, they like it sandy I believe, and thats the last thing I have.  Thick and heavy solid clay is all my garden beds can provide.  Therefore I grow carrots in pots.     I mix some fresh compost with some old compost garden soil mix, with a good couple of trowel-fulls of sand.  The good thing about stocking up on garden essentials last year, such a great big old bag of horticultural sand, means that when you get up one morning and decide to sow carrots, you don't first have to make a trip to the local garden centre.  Hopefully my little orange friends will enjoy my soil recipe.  The seeds are just sprinkled on the top of the soil, et voila! C'est fini.  Leave till summer.

I know I thought my compost was poor last year, but looking back its terrible!  Seems to be mainly composed of wood rather than soil.  None of these seedlings survived the great slug outbreak of 2014

Pepper - Sweet minimix and sweet topepo rosso.  Ah the peppers.  We had a tumultuous time, my peppers and I, last year.  I sowed them, they grew, I had a beautiful tray of seedlings, and then a slug invited itself to dinner.  One, just one little seedling was left after that first feast, and then he snuck back and polished that one as well.  So my peppers were exclusively provided by shop bought plants.  Weirdly, my all time most read post is one in which I admit that I neglected to eat most of the peppers I grew last year.  Despite being popular, I plan to not repeat this post again this year.  As the seeds are from last year I didn't stint.  I sowed ten-ish seeds in two pots, one variety in each.  They are currently snug on my kitchen windowsill, but they will have to elbow themselves some room the moment the pop up.  Seed compost, quarter of an inch deep, if your interested.

Who named this plant?! How can such as thing of beauty be called a toad lily? So spotty

Tricyrtis - hirta. Ok so its not all vegetables.  This is another new seed purchase.  Shouldn't have admitted that, the other half will not be happy! I bought these at Kew Gardens because I saw these at a garden I visited last year and was completely entranced by them.  Getting hold of one myself has been a different matter.  I have not been able to get my hands on this elusive seed anywhere, so when I saw it in Kew, it was clearly going to be mine.  These are a lily-type of flower, which hopefully means they will not be poisonous to my cat.  Their common name is the toad lily, which I love.  What an unattractive  name for a lovely flower.

Sweet Peas - Yes more sweet peas, remember I wish to hand them out in the street to strangers in the summer.  I actually sowed these last week but I forgot.  I sowed one of each of the varieties I sowed originally.  They have the challenge of germinating outside which none of my sweet peas so far have had to do.  I can't promise this will be my last batch.