Seed sowing time is here again!

Excuse the poor quality of the photos but the only way I could get close ups of the packets was to use the zoom function on my phone camera & the results are not the best in the world!

Encouraging to know that my eyesight hasn't deteriorated even more. LOL LOL LOL

...good luck with your seeds, Balcony.

Quite a mild week forecast, with rain on Friday.

No your eyesight is as keen as ever, TT! You spotted my blog when I'd hardly published it! :-))

Thanks for the good wishes & I think I'll make a start tomorrow as we are forecast a sunnier day & a little warmer than of late! Today it has rained almost nonstop all day. Fortunately it has been of the "good" type, i.e. the type that soaks into the ground instead of flooding it or running off, taking your precious soil with it!

Yes, I heard this morning we are forecast a warmer week. Good job too! I'm trying to get over my 2nd bad cold in a month! Till today (excluding the 1 & 1/2 hours at church) I hadn't been out of the flat since about last Tuesday! That's the second time in a month I've been a "prisoner" in my home for a 5 day period! Beginning to feel the necessity of "stretching my wings" again!

Yes, the rain will do good to your allotment.

You have ANOTHER cold ? Maybe take a course of one-a-day vitamin C with zinc... I hope you feel better soon.

Thanks, TT. The 2nd one was probably my fault for spending too much time in the freezing (literally!) cold on the allotment digging in the last of the horse manure I had for my new plot. My feet got sooo cold I was almost crying with pain when I stopped a couple of times to have a hot drink. I'd had the foresight to take a Thermos flask down with me full of piping hot water to make some instant soup & a cup of tea!

The first time came from the trip to London on Remembrance Sunday. After the service in Whitehall finished we when for a walk & sat down on a seat in St James' Park in front of the lake. We had to sit in a cold wind & I didn't take a heavy coat with me, I just wore a suit jacket. My feet also got terribly cold during the day so a few days later I came down with a bad cold.

I was able to do at least 3/4 of the pact where the old Raspberry beds were. I dug them up & the Couch grass & then went back over them digging in horse manure. I was able to do 2 1/2 beds with the manure before it ran out. I've now 1 1/2 left to dig manure into. I had intended to do a blog but I never seem to get around to it.

Sounds like you need to wrap up warm, Balcony ..
... winter drawers on ;o)

It's surprising they came so quickly at this time of year. I didn't know you could get strawberry seeds.
I'm looking forward to you telling us how they all did on the allotment next year.

seeds are a passion Balcony, I dont care what they are, they just hold such promise & ebay seed buying is the best, my chillies just came through the post last week along with a few other veg varieties & like you say, p&p combined saves a few pennies. I still like looking at the seed stands in garden centres but cannot really afford their prices when I buy 30 or more pkts. I like to find alternative seed scources on the net plus swops & harvesting own seed such as beans & peas etc. Good luck with your early sowing program, Im starting a few things off in January, l already have Italian Kale sprouted about 2 weeks ago & they are in the unheated greenhouse.
btw, I print a small colour photo off ebay when I buy seed from them to keep with the seed in their plain plastic wallets when they arrive. Not always necessary but it helps ID a new variety I havent tried before.

Good Luck with your seeds Balcony, they will keep you busy, Happy Gardenin for 2012;0)

Happy sowing.

Thank you all for reading & your comments which are always appreciated.

Thanks for your concern, TT, I don't have any "winter drawers" but I have to wear thermal underwear, my doctor told me about 3 years ago to buy a thermal vest with long sleeves & "Longjohns". I felt embarrassed at first but after a few weeks I became accustomed to them & now wear them every winter. They are supposed to help with my circulation & I suppose they do but they don't stop me losing circulation in my feet & hands! My feet often get soooo cold I almost cry from the pain but there's nothing that can be done about it & I just have to try & avoid the situations that bring it on!

I'm a little surprised you didn't know about Strawberry seeds, Hywel, the little yellowish dots on the outside of them are the seeds! I think it's one of the very few fruits in the world that wears its seeds on its outside instead of inside! I grew some Alpine Strawberries from seed last year that a GoY member sent me. I also bought a windowsill greenhouse pack of Strawberries. These packs come with everything except the water, you add that, to grow your own plants. I didn't have as much success with that as with the Alpines. But I did get a few plants which I put in my new allotment a few months ago. I intend to grow more plants this year, I'll document them & put their progress on a blog.

Bampy, you & I are one of a kind! I also love to grow seeds & often they are my preferred method of getting new plants. I still remember as a boy in London collecting Pansy seeds from the big containers the council put in the streets, full of lovely blooming Pansies for months & months on end! I had no idea at that time they were hybrids & wouldn't come true from seed later. I just collected the seeds from the plants I liked best & then sowed some in my garden.

Your idea of printing off colour photos of them is a very good idea! I could do the same! Thanks for the idea!

I sowed some of the Sweetpeas yesterday in the GH on the plot. I sowed about 1/3rd of the seeds in toilet paper tubes I'd been saving for this very purpose! When I get enough to fill another tray I'll sow some more! 20+ tubes fit in a standard seedtray.

Balcony - there is nothing wrong with wearing thermals. I wear thermal socks in bed and have just converted the OH to wearing them as well. I have also been buying OH long johns and thermal tops to wear under jeans and sweatshirts for a few years now - he often works in unheated buildings and couldn't do without them in the winter.

We just need someone to invent socks and gloves that heat up and stay warm all day now!!

I quite agree with you Flybo, there's no shame in wearing thermal underwear but "Longjohns" were a bit embarrassing to wear at first but, as I said above, you soon get used to wearing them & they do help out.

Yesterday as we were forecast higher temps than in a few weeks so I thought I would leave my thermals off. Even though it certainly was a warmer day I missed the "Longjohns"! We had a much longer wait at the busstop than it should have had, the bus we were waiting for arrived at least 15mins late! I felt the wind through my thin trousers as if I weren't wearing any! When we returned home I quickly put them on again!

I agree wholeheartedly with your last comment! How I wish somebody would invent something thin yet would keep ones feet warm! I start to lose circulation in my toes within a few minutes of going out! :-((

*s* when I first saw this blog, I read the title as "speed sowing" - oh, a new technique, I thought. and came in to see what it was. (visual impairment can have its amusing moments!)

I've got so many packs of seeds on my Amazon wish list, but what do i need several hundred seeds for? though it might take that many for me to get half a dozen plants. (Maybe we could have a "seed swopshop" section in GoY?!)

I was surprised to see Bluebell seeds - I thought they grew from bulbs, but the blurb said that if you buy the seeds you'll know they're from a legal source, bluebells being a protected species these days. Oh, I would love to have the room for them - and poppies, and cornflowers, and - oh, so much more

The other prob with winter gardening is the opposite - that of overheating and cooling down too fast. I usually take my jacket off, or at least unzip it, when I start to sweat, so that I can put it back on or do it up again when I take a break; it's uncomfortable, but "they say" it's better than getting too hot or too cold, or both in succession.

"*s* when I first saw this blog, I read the title as "speed sowing" - oh, a new technique, I thought. and came in to see what it was. (visual impairment can have its amusing moments!)..."

That was an "amusing moment", Fran! :-D) I avoid wish lists - they can become a major source of frustration! Anyway I'd wish for practically everything that could be wished for!!! I started a wish list of Sci-Fi Books on Amazon but dropped it after I was getting dozens of books on it! I haven't looked for seeds on Amazon & I've only bought seeds once online, this year at the beginning of December, on eBay.

Almost any kind of bulb can be bought & grown from seed. The problem is the amount of time they take. That's why it's more expensive to buy bulbs than seed. My Amaryllis, for example, took 4 years to produce their first flowers from seed! I have around 50 bulbs & they take up a lot of space. Obviously at first they grew in the space where I now grow about five. As each year went by they needed more & more space, water, fertilizer, light & heat all these cost money - imagine in a commercial setting then!

Another thing with seed is it doesn't always come true, especially from hybrids, so you often won't know what you are getting till they flower!

Part of the fun for us growing them at home but not for a commercial grower!

most of the seeds on my wish list are never going to be bought: they're meadow flowers, wild flowers, and need a damn sight more space than I have. but still, you never know, i might win the lottery and be able to buy Epping Forest!

I don't seem to have much luck with seeds; I'm obviusly doing something wrong, or at least not doing something right - the seed tray things don't hold much moisture, so in su mmer they dry out too fast, and then i drown them. And if I put the transparent lid on, they only grow mould, and if I leave it off they dry out too quickly. I have tried leaving the lid just a fraction ajar, to allow air movement, but so far no luck. Of course it might just be that the mini-shed just isn't warm enough to give them a chance, but, until i can get a windowsill shelf indoors, it's all I have.

I usually plant half a pack of seeds, working on the principle that I need that many tries to get just a few - but if I were too successful I'd have a problem with finding room for them all.

lol I often don't know what I've got even after it's flowered! Some plants I just can't identify, despite having the whole web to look at. For eg, I have several conifers, and can't put a species anme to a single one of them.

couple more amusing moments: when I used to watch TV there was a medical drama "ER". It was in the listings magazine as: "10.00 ER" I never failed to read that as "10. oo-er" and I often had to re-read "The Animals of Farthing Wood" because I kept missing out a crucial "h" the first time!

I don't really know what to suggest with your seed problem. What compost do you use for them? Perhaps if you use a seed/cuttings compost you might change it for a normal plant compost, that wouldn't be so free draining so that it retains the moisture more. Are your seedtrays in direct sunlight for more than an hour or two? Seeds need bright, indirect light rather than direct sunlight, but I imagine you already know that.

I think you do well in not sowing more than half a packet at a time, at least you have two opportunities then! You seem a lot like me in not wanting to throw excess seedlings away! On the allotment I never sow in rows in the soil but in seedtrays in the GH then I prick them out into small, individual pots to grow on before putting them in the soil. That way I can also space them out from the beginning at their proper spacing & save on seeds!

I can understand that it is not easy to keep track of what you have growing as I'm the same! Since I began to post on gardening forums (I'm on 3 at present!) I've begun to keep better track of what I have! If you lose the original label, if it even came with the right one, then it's not always easy to identify what you have growing! I found that with Fuchsias, some years ago I bought lots of small plants (25) from a stall in the market place. They all grew very well but one or two didn't correspond to the description on the labels & I had a lot of difficulty in identifying them, there are sooo many different varieties & many look like each other that id from pictures on the web isn't always easy. Even when you think you found the right one it turns out its a trailer when yours is upright & vice versa! Very frustrating!

I use ordinary potting compost in the seed trays - it's all I buy so I use it for everything. I've really only got the one shed to put seeds in, and that's at the "sunny" end of the garden; it might get a bit more than an hour a day. the other shed is halfway along the garden, and wouldn't get even that much, which is why I use it for storage - not room to put it beside the othe one.

I keep meaning to make lists of plants and seeds, so I know what I've got; then i can look up care and make notes in the same place, keep it all together. sigh, one dday I'll actually get round to it

think I need to get in an expert to tell me what my plants are! *s* then get a second opinion, just to make sure

Like you I only use one type of compost, in fact till Gerry brought down a bag of the seed & cutting compost last year to the GH on the plot I'd not seen it before & was very surprised to see it contained a fair bit of sand! Just yesterday I went into Wilcos to have a look around to see if they had started to bring in gardening stuff though I thought it might be a bit early as the New Year hadn't arrived yet. I was surprised to find they have brought in quite a lot of stuff! They have a lovely display of seeds there! No other living stuff as yet though. Plenty of time for that! I saw they had some bags of seed & cutting compost of their own brand so I thought I might get a couple of bags for the GH on the plot next year - well next year as there are only less than 4 hours to midnight & the change of years!

Happy New Year 2012 to you!

There are so many different types of compost on sale that I get totally bewildered: seed and potting, general purpose, tomato, orchid, peat, non-peat, and the special compost for heather and lime-bating or lime-loving plants (can't rememeber which way heather goes). I just get the one-size-fits-all and hope for the best.

Some of the gardening books give recipes for compost for seeds and cuttings: they include sand, no idea why, unless it helps drainage or something? and it has to be "sharp" sand, whatever that is!

it's "next year" now, so hope it goes well for you all year long

Thank you very much for your good wishes & I also hope you have a good year this year! :-))

I understand how you feel about the different composts & like you I tend to use a general type for everything. As I don't have any acid loving plants I never buy Ericaceous compost, though I did once when my wife bought me a Camellia for my birthday a few years ago. I don't know why but last year it died on me, just the year it had the most buds as well! I had done nothing different from previous years.

Heathers can be of both types but, if I remember correctly, it's the winter flowering type that do well in normal compost whereas the spring flowering type requires acid soil to grow correctly.

Sand (sharp) is included in many composts to improve drainage & adds weight. You can also buy Silver sand which I believe is finer whereas Sharp sand is coarser.

Some plants have to have a specialized compost & will not grow in "normal" compost, like for example, Orchids, as you mention. These need a compost that is made almost entirely of a certain type of moss & practically without nutrients.

Tomatoes will grow in normal compost perfectly well, you just need to water them with tomato or rose fertilizer as these contain much more potash/potassium that they need for fruiting/flowering.

As for Peat or Non-Peat compost the debate is an environmental issue. Many say the extraction of peat from bogs is destroying the bogs as it is not replaced & anyway takes 100s of years to develop. There are many replacement composts made today that don't contain peat as a basic ingredient any longer. Unless you really set out to find it you probably won't find it (compost with peat) as most composts are no longer made with peat.

I've got four heather plants - no idea which type, as all the label said wsa "heather"; they're in normal compost, so time will tell which variety I've got.

I prefer non-peat, for ecological reasons: humans have already depleted coal and oil that took thousands of years to form just so we could burn it up in a couple of hundred!
in the old days peat compost was all you could get but now, as you say, there's plenty of alternatives so one can garden with a clear conscience - although peat cutting did uncover those amazingly preserved bog bgdies showing prehistoric human sacrifice, that's not exactly why the peat was cut.

ah, knew there was something different about tomatoes and roses; it was the fertiliser/food, which I also don't have; if my roses survive till spring I'll try some, they look like they need feeding up

You should prune your roses well back in a couple of months time but don't give them liquid fertilizer till the first buds start to put in an appearance.

As I only use liquid fertilizer I automatically think everybody else does as well! You can apply powered fertilizer earlier of course, following the instructions on the box.

Roses will stand for a lot of hard pruning if kept well fed & watered during the growing season & left to rest during the winter.

I use whatever is available but it's not easy to find peat based compost nowadays - this surprised me when I came back from Spain & started gardening in the UK again. Also I couldn't find the chemical sprays I'd been used to using 20 years earlier, I didn't know at the time that most had been removed from the market.

oops, I cut them back already; they were very thin and spindly, most only had one stem, and it was too long to go in the mini-greenhouse, so I cut it back. They were more like twigs than plants anyway. A couple had more than one stem, so some I cut back less than others, to see if it made a difference. Time will tell.

I have a powdered generic plant food which I use when I remember - and when I remember to water the plants, they've not needed it much lately! I also have some slow-release pellets, but I keep forgetting to use them when I'm repotting plants, as they're supposed to be buried below root level.

I have Baby Bio for the indoor ones, also when I remember - the book said that Spiders need feeding with every watering, as they grow all through the year.

Mostly I water the indoor plants with mik-bottle water - I read that when you finish a bottle of milk, if you fill it with water and use that on the plants, it acts as food. Been doing it for years, not killed any yet, so at least it's not doing them any harm (I should water a couple with plain water so I can compare the difference!)

This time of year, when they don't need so much watering, I have two or three bottles filled with water beside the kitchen sink waiting to be used. I used that on the greenhouse plants last time, too - first time I've thought of watering them since moving them under cover. If nothing else, at least it means they get water that's not straight out of the tap.

Which chemical sprays are those? pesticides, you mean? I think there are a lot fewer than there used to be, and so there should be! considering what widespread use of sprays of all kinds has done, from DDT up (or down)

You won't have hurt your roses by cutting them back so early. Normally to get big flowers you need to prune them back to within a couple of inches of the soil. It will also make for stronger plants.

There are fewer pesticides for the general public's use & that is a good thing. Before going to Spain I used insecticides for everything & didn't think anything about it. In Spain they were much more difficult to get hold of simply because there was no gardening market like in the UK. But you could buy tins of aerosol that killed many of the garden pests.

Spider plants can live for years without feeding, though of course a feed will make them look much better & they will be much healthier. Mine get fed, when I remember, with general fertilizer in spring when I'm feeding my other plants, but with tomato feed when I'm feeding the tomatoes & other plants on the balcony.

Never used the water from milk bottles. I do let water stand for a day or two so that it is at ambient temperature & to give time for the gases in it to evaporate.

I'm trying a no-chem garden, which really isn't that big a deal, given what I've got at the moment! I did find places online where one could buy ladybird eggs, but it said you need an aphid infestation for them to feed on when they hatch, so not sure whether I'd want to encourage them that much!

Someone told me that soaking a cigarette in water, then using that water to spray plants, was effective; as was a few drops of washing up liquid in a lot of water. Don't remember having tried either myself. And they probably still count as "chemical gardening"

I'd only had about three roses from the six or seven plants that I have; rre enough for me to post a pic of my first one! A lot of the stems were dead, so I cut those right down and just cut back the others. Time will tell.

Spider plants are virtually indestructbile, but only virtuallly! one garden book I had said that if people can't keep Spiders alive, they should move to an another hobby, such as piano-smashing! but they're incredibly resilient. I need to find other - I think the Aspidistra is classed as such? but managed to kill one of them, too.

Milk bottles are the only way that I can have water standing - maybe it's just the fact of not getting water straight from the cold tap that does it. I should experiemnt, and do some milk bottles a second time, when it'd be just water, so long as I remember which plants to give which water to - and keep notes to compare progress.

The 50s and 60s were the Chemical Golden Age: all those new products that were going to make life better all round: DDT, Thalidomide... even aerosols themselves.

I read an article by Isaac Asimov, oh, thirty years ago, about ozone delpletion: he called it Freon, rather than CFCs, but it scared the pants off me and I refused to use aerosol sprays after: even when I went to get my hair done they'd ask, do you want hairspray? I'd ask, Is it ozone-friendly? and if it didn't say so on the tin, I'd refuse. It became a joke to people who knew me: how I'd use solid furniture polish and take ages rather than a quck spray and a wipe. Sigh, if onlyuthey'd listened to me and Isaac ...

I did a search to see if my idea of CFC & Freon being the same was correct. It seems it was & this site offers a fairly clear & understandable explanation:

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-freon.htm

I also read about this in Wikipedia but the explanation, although at first confirming my idea when to far & just went over my head, whereas the site I link to above has a better explanation & is easier to understand without delving into complicated chemical formulas.

I didn't know Asimov had spoken out against the use of these chemicals.

Other than fertilizer I seldom use chemical products any longer. Other than for cleaning the cooker that is!

He mentioned Freon in connect with fridge coolants - I've goot several books of his essays, but want lots more, even if they're out of date by now.

Thanks for the link, I've saved it and will read it properly later.

I Googled "Isaac Asimov Freon" and the concensus seems to be that it was in the collection The Planet That Wasn't.

There is at least one of his essays that I wish could be read on the net, for more people to read: Lost in Non-Translation is an eloquent essay on racial tolerance - as valid today as ever

I searched for 'The Planet That Wasn't & when I found it I copied it & pasted it into a word document for reading later. It occupied 9 pages with New Romans font 12! I searched for 'Lost in Non-Translation' as well but the page I found only lists all of Isaac's works. I didn't search any further.

Hope you find the 'Freon' article interesting.

you found the Freon article online and pasted it in?? that's more than I found! could you share the link, if you still have it, please??

There was another of his articles besides "lost" that I wished could be more widely available, but damned if I can remember what it is now!

I'm sorry I don't very often save links & this was one I didn't save. Nevertheless I did paste it into a Word document. If you PM me with your email address I could email you a copy & then you could adapt it for your eyesight.

All the same I've just done another search but I can't seem to find the original link. On Amazon there are paperbacks available for 1p + £2.80pp.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/0380018136/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&qid=1326035389&sr=1-1&condition=used

thanks daer! I have the books, but in a boxed stack of books that'll take time to excavate!

oh, i remembered the other "essential" article I mentioned: "No space for women" or something like that; how the US has consistently denied women a significant part in the space age so far

Haven't been able to find a work of Asimov's with that title.

have I mentioned "the unsecret weapon" yet? *s*

I did a search & came up with this page:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?115391

But I can't find a direct link to the essay in itself. On the same site there is a page that lists ALL his essays!

nods, all I've been able to find myself is the list of essays, some discussions of them, but not them themselves. sigh. looks like i'll have to find my books, can them in, then convert them to Word so that I've got a fair soht at being able to read them - once i can find them!

There's an Asimov Online, and another, that has list after list after list. but little more, double sigh

woulda thought that *some* might have been availble t to buy as ebooks - pther than the one Amazon has for Kindle.

A few years ago I joined a Yahoo mailing list dedicated to Isaac Asimov. I found I wasn't all that interested in the list after a few months & cancelled my subscription. But while I was still a member I was sent an archive of his works. It was in a compressed format & I have kept it on my computer ever since.

Last night after posting a comment here, my last comment on the board for yesterday, I closed my browser & started to look through some of the old archives in MY DOCUMENTS. I came across the folder I'd named Asimov, I opened it & there the folder with the compressed works of Asimov was!

I started to read a story but before I could finish it it was time to go to bed.

I'll have a look through the archives later & see what there is as I've not opened it since I first downloaded it. I've just found a trail programme to decompress the compressed archives. AS I rarely use compressed files I don't have a programme on my computer for decompressing them.

I have WinRar - I did have WinZip, but that won't work unless you buy it after a trial period. WinRar lets you carry on using it free.

WinRar is the programme I downloaded today, but it's a trail version that can be used for 40 days free. When it installed & I opened it I realized I'd had this programme years ago on the computer, what happened to it I don't know.

on my version, when I open it, there's a "buy" option, but I just x that box closed and carry on using it. I suppose I should pay for it, and I will one day, but I keep thinking that I'll do it "next time"

I've been busy working on the allotment & writing on gardening forums that I haven't had time to decompress more files of Asimov's writings.

I must spend half an hour decompressing them all & then I will be able to read them!

Just this week I've taken out two books that Asimov wrote from the library. The first of them was "I, Robot". I read it in English & Spanish years ago but I thought I would refresh my memory! Unfortunately just the night before getting the book I had read a recompilation of many of his Robot tales in a book in Spanish. When I opened the book in English I found I had read the very 1st story just 2 nights before in Spanish! When the following night I reached the last story I found the same! So I read the book in less than 2 nights!

The 2nd book is called "The Caves of Steel" I've never read this book - neither in English or Spanish!

lol, I have to decompress mine to pdf, convert to Word, change font size, colour, marins, then edit line by line before I can read 'em!

The Caves of Steel is the first in a trilogy, if not a quartet: Caves of Steel, Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn - think there was a later add-on.

*s* despite Daneel being touted as a "robot detective" he's very much the Dr Watson figure!

I read "Robots of Dawn" many years ago & I'm reading "Caves of Steel" at present. I don't think I've ever read the other two.

I don't know if it makes a difference which order you read them in, they recap, as far as I remember - althought the Caves does explain Lije's reaction to being outdoors, if the other ones don't. There's also one with Baley's son and Galida from Dawn; and the Complete Robot has another short story, which is new to me, so looking forward to being able to read that!