My week of sowing 1 - Stocks, snapdragons, panicum elegans and the staircase plant

It was all very well buying 50 packets of seed, but now I have to get them all in the ground.  This is going to have to be like a military assault; planned to the last degree.  Somehow I have to schedule at least one sowing of all the varieties so that the sowing falls in the brief window particularly favourable to each variety, without running out of space on my garage windowsill.  For the moment I have one small windowsill and one washing up bowls-worth of space to play with.  Glamorous life that I lead.  No greenhouses for me!  I am going to have to use the garage strictly for germination, and at the first sign of green chuck them out to fend for themselves on the patio in the cold.  I will of course try and protect them with my usual rather homespun solution of bubble wrap and fleece.

This being the case I will have to make use of every weekend pretty much to sow various bits.  Rather than lots of individual posts, for the meantime I will just do a weekly round-up of how my sowing is going, what I have sown, what's germinated, what's annoying me, what Im crying over, that kind of thing.

So this week I will cover anything I have sown in the past two weeks that hasn't already appeared in a blog.

Panicum Elegans - 'frosted explosion' I fell in love with this grass when I saw it in a garden last year surrounding bright orange dahlias with a golden halo.  Im a big fan of grass after the verges in my village were left to their own devices for months.

I sowed the seeds of this at the same time as the aquilegia, so on a freezing cold day.  Again, just like aquilegia these seeds were miniature and it was difficult to tell if I had even got them in the pot or just dusted them gently all over the patio instead.  I attempted to put five seeds in each pot, but we will see what comes up!

Panicum elegans- I just love this combination of flowers caught up in faintly
pinkish clouds of texture

Antirrhinum - 'bizarre hybrids'  I have never grown snapdragons before.  In fact, possibly shockingly, Im not even sure I could identify one, and that is why I have decided to grow some this year.  These really appealed as they are all marbled colours.  Im not a hundred percent sure what these will end up looking like but they might be stripey purple with some pink?

When a packet gives you 300 hundred seeds, I figure you can afford to toss quite a few in.  I am never going to sow them all before they get old so I might as well.  If all thirty come up I will just have to give them away!  I sowed these this weekend in two pots, 15 or so in each.  Not that I had any real chance of actually counting, these seeds are miniature!  They make the frosted explosion ones look huge.  Instead I sprinkled them on and we can only hope they don't all germinate in the same place.  Apparently snapdragons can take quite a while to germinate so Im thinking these could be quite a space hogger.

Leonotis Leonurus - I don't get how this is even possible but Im looking
forward to seeing how this actually grows

Stocks - the only one of these four plants that I have grown before, although this is a brand new packet.  I have never got on terribly well with growing them myself which is annoying because they are my favourite cut flower.  This is probably due to not getting on with it early enough in previous years and not planting them out with enough time for them to actually flower.  Well not this year!  I may sow more than one batch depending on what germinates as I love them so.

Again a packet of 300 so I bunged in lots.  Two pots of 15 seeds.  These seeds are slightly more visible being small flat disks.  Still fiddly but countable and its possible to see these in the pots.

Leonotis leonurus - 'Staircase plant'.  This plant is truly strange.  Each orange flower appears atop a stem out of the centre of the previous flower until there is a tower.  Im not sure what Im going to do with these tall plants, but I couldn't resist growing something so bizarre.

Numbers are a little more limited with this one, with only 20 seeds in total to play with.  That being the case, and the fact that I don't actually want hundreds I only planted 3 seeds in each of two pots.  These, unlike the last two actually wanted burying a bit and the seeds were quite long.

Gardening at this time of year really does take some commitment.  Both weekends were perfect examples of hideous weather.  The first freezing and the second absolutely tipping it down with rain.  While Friday was a beautiful day, on Saturday I virtually had to put my waders on to get out there to put compost in my pots.

In germinating news the first little green snout of my second batch of sweet peas is up!