It’s been raining here pretty heavily for a few days now. So much so that all the work I want to get started on my vege beds has to be put off due to the muddiness. I also have to pick up some supplies to work on the soil and make it a bit more water tolerant. Right now the soil is quite muddy and isn’t soaking through with water well enough. That being said all the seedlings that I have planted are all doing excellently already. Some have even doubled in size. It’s all very exciting.
So to make use of my time today I decided to do some work on my seedlings and seed raising.
Above is my work bench with a few essentials like watering bottles, seed raising mix, seedling trays, seaweed solution etc etc. The next picture is a small table I have out in my backyard in the sun with a seedling tray, and two mini greenhouses. These are where I have done all my seed raising so far, and its been to mixed results, but mostly only due to the fact that I sewed them a little early, not expecting our renovations to take as long as they did which kept putting off building the beds.
This seedling tray is full of different types of lettuces.
I am growing amish deers tongue, australian yellow leaf, baby cos, forellenschuss and celtuce. The above pictures are from the diggers website, which is where I acquired all of my seeds. It shows what they will grow into. I chose them all for different reasons. The amish deers tongue can be steamed or eaten raw, the next three are all available to pick a leaf at a time continually, with different flavours. And the celtuce, well it was fascinating. It is a lettuce that you continually pick the leaves off and eat like cos lettuce, and then when it reaches about 30cm high you pick the stem to eat similar to celery.
I also had to move some of my tomato seedlings into bigger individual pots so I did that today. These two are reisetomate (travelling tomatoes). I started growing them in jiffy pots and they needed to be put into individual pots. I’m just using some margarine containers. I also planted another silverbeet, and 4 more tomatoes. Two of the other jiffy pots contain pepper fish chilies. They are a variegated hot chili and I just can’t wait to use them in everything.
In my final seed tray I have spinach and some capsicums (bell peppers). That tiny little red seedling popping through is from a climbing spinach that has this red stem and green leaves that you can continually pick, which really seemed like a great idea for us and our spinach loving lifestyle. I am also growing bloomsdale spinach, which hasn’t started to show through yet. Everything was heavily wet, so I needed to drain some water from these trays after the amount of water that has been pelting down.
But its all looking great, and a quick way to do some gardening on a rainy day.
