When I dragged myself out of bed this morning the evidence of an overnight frost was there for all to see, but at least it was sunny and being outdoors appeared quite inviting regardless of the mud that keeps trying to suck the boots from my feet whenever I wander about in the garden.
By the time I was vaguely compos mentis however, the sky hard turned grey and the rain had returned, so I opted to hide in the greenhouse as there was plenty of sowing to be done.
First up was peppers and chiles. For chiles I have: jalapenos, cayennes, Hungarian black (no, that’s a chile, honest) and a variety of Capsicum baccatum that is allegedly the same as used in commercial Peppadew peppers, to which I am rather partial. I’ve tried growing the latter before and they’re impressive plants, making as much as 2m of growth in a season, but they seem to need a long season too. Last year I got fruit and left them on the plant as long as possible to see if they would ripen until a very hard frost turned them to mush 🙁 This year I shall plant them in Frankenstein’s (passive solar) greenhouse to see if that helps.
When it comes to sweet peppers I have unknown purple and chocolate varieties of bell pepper, plus a pointy red variety called Kapia and a yellow Corno di Toro.
After that came, err, “lots” of onions. About 450 seeds of a red variety called Carmen and about 250 “brown” onions, most of which were “Density IV” and the rest were “Yellow Rynsburger” which were left over from last year. I should perhaps plant some of those out of the way when the time comes and allow them to produce seed.
Then I had an aubergine variety called Black Beauty, flat- and curly-leaf parsley (Gigante d’Italia and Moss Curled 2(?)), radishes (French Breakfast 3), dill, and the rest were flowers: rudbeckia, more antirrhinums (Black Prince and Royal Bride), nicotiana, ammi majus and a couple of varieties of sweet pea.
In all I think I sowed thirty trays (twenty cell half-size module trays) of seeds. About half are in the propagators, but I’m going to need more space in the greenhouse once I’ve done more sowing next weekend. I really need to get the strawberry beds finished so the new plants that are currently in the greenhouse can be planted out, but the ground is so wet again that I might have to decide instead that the peppers I tried to keep alive over Winter are in fact as dead as they look and make more space by ditching them in the compost.
