My week of sowing 3 - Broad beans, cucumbers, hares tails, bunny tails.

Beautiful bunny tail grass, you can see the longer hair-like seed ends

You know how it is, you think you've got all the time in the world, am well ahead of the game, and then suddenly there is tones to do and your well behind.  Thats what occurred this week in my mind.  Last week there didn't seem any rush, I just sowed some sunflowers to pass the time, nothing was pressing.  It was all good.  This week less so.

It all started with my little retrospective last Friday.  I discovered that this time last year I had already sowed my broad beans.  This made me feel slightly panicked, if sowing vegetables can really justify such a feeling.  Actually I don't think it can.  Nobody has ever felt panicked by a vegetable Im sure.  I had also sowed cucumbers.  Admittedly this went terribly wrong so I probably still have a few weeks grace, but even so I feel a pressing need to get some seed in some soil.  Therefore this week has been less a case of 'what did I sow?', and more of a case of 'what did I not sow?'

Broad Bean - Witkiem (Manita) I have sowed these in exactly the same way as I did last year because it worked a charm, and if it ain't broke etc.  I used one of these plastic segmented tray thingys which are quite handy but not terribly resilient.  Once watered it buckles under its own weight, and the plastic, being cheap, has a habit of splitting after a while.  However, Im running short of little pots and beggars can't be choosers.  I used normal compost for these because broad beans seem pretty large sturdy things surely capable of pushing through slightly more solid soil.  The tray allows for 15 beans to be sown so thats what I did.  As the packet explicitly says the beans will be white I was surprised to find them brown in the packet, but as they are a year old I guess that figures.  I am germinating these hopefully tough beans outside as I did last year, protected by some bubble wrap at night.  Got to keep my eyes peeled for slugs from now on because they love a juicy bit of produce like this.

Cucumbers - It seems too early to be sowing these really but the packets say from February so who am I to argue?  I sowed five different varieties because one can never have enough variety.  I joke, Im not sure what I was thinking when I bought all of them, a cucumber is a cucumber at the end of the day.  Due to this I have only sown one of each variety at this point, mainly because of a lack of space, but also if it goes pear-shaped, as I expect it will, I have more seeds to sow.  You never seem to get that many seeds in a cucumber packet which doesn't leave much room for error.

A prized La Diva cucumber from my crop last year, what a beauty!

I was going to germinate these in the garage but all the packets say a temperature range between 20-25 degrees celsius. While the garage may be warmer than outside, there is no way its ever gone to reach that.  So the house it is.  I am trepidatious about this because last year this resulted in long stringy cucumbers that wilted the moment they crossed the threshold of the garden.  But this year the moment I see the first peak of green, straight into the garage they shall go.  Iv located them on the kitchen windowsill for the moment.

Unusually the seeds like to be laid on their edge in the seed compost about a quarter of an inch down.  I shan't go into each of the five varieties much at the moment because I could probably go on for a whole post, but the varieties are Socrates,Telegraph Improved, Louisa, Marketmore 76 and La Diva.

Hares Tails and Bunny Tails - These seeds are different from my others because I collected them myself.  I bought the adult plants at Hampton Court last year not realising that they were annuals, and I made sure I got my money's worth by collecting the seeds.  These are lovely plants; grasses with beautifully soft pompoms floating around on the top.  The only difference between the two seems to be that bunny tails are super short in comparison to hares tails.

Sowing the seed was a tad fiddly.  I carefully extracted the hares tail seeds when I collected them, but I ran out of patience when it came to the bunny and I just chopped off the intact heads and stuffed them all into the envelop.  Turns out the best method is not to pull apart the head but to just pull on the longer whiskers that stick out from the main fluff. These denote the seeds and can be extracted quite easily.  Convincing the damned things with their long tails to get under the soil and stay there is another matter. I prodded and mushed and I think they are all now just about covered but it wasn't pretty.  I sowed half and half in one small tray, but I sowed about a hundred.  I clearly don't need that many but I have hundred of seeds and they are so lovely so I thought what the hell, stuff them in.  And I managed to find a space to wedge these into the garage for germination.

Bright, sunny anthemis flowers.  I think they look like yellow flying saucers,
or tennis balls in skirts

Anthemis - Again these are my own home collected seeds.  An anthemis is a lovely daisy, in this case bright yellow.  This flowers pretty early so after looking up when they wanted sowing, as clearly my envelop doesn't say, I had to get them in some soil quick.  The seeds just wanted sprinkling over the top of the soil, in this case one small tray of seed compost.  I have kept a few seeds over just incase, just like the cucumbers, they don't decide to live.  These are going to have to deal with germinating in the garden in my cold frame as there is no more room at the inn that is the garage.

As for my previously sown stuff, there is signs of life in the stocks pots, with tiny hints of green but not actual shoots yet.  Nothing else has done anything at all which is dull.  However weirdly one last sweet pea has randomly popped up weeks after all the rest which is always a welcome surprise.  Next week will be another busy sower, I will definitely get some sugar snaps in.