Seedling experiment - the results!

Well, many thanks to Linda Woodrow for her growing from seeds tips. I, like a number of you in blogland, had been having trouble with my strike rate growing seeds in punnets and blogged about that here. Linda kindly shared her tips about growing seeds in a polystyrene box, so I rescued a number of them from the back of the local supermarket. And decided to try an experiment.
So, I planted up a set of punnets and a number of rows of vegie seeds into the polystyrene box on the 9th October. I'm afraid I didn't have the energy to go dig up a bucketful of creek sand and collect cow manure from the farmer's field about 10 minutes' drive away, so I just used good quality seed raising mix in both the punnets and the box. Here's the results:

Things are looking pretty good in the polystyrene box aren't they?

But over in punnet-world:

That's right folks - on lousy leek seed is just starting to sprout!
So, guess who is a complete convert to planting seeds in the polystyrene box? You guessed it - that'd be me!

Very busy time in the emerging food forest at the moment. A Pictorial update in the next few days I promise!
Enjoy - Greenie x

A little holiday

Ah! Down the beach for a little relax! The view from our room:

And what is the first thing I think when I see that view? Just imagine all the veggies I could grow where that lawn is!!

Enjoy your weekend all
Greenie x

Lessons and Yolks

Well, first an update on the Monster Monster egg. Yep, she was a double yolker all right!

We got a yummy lunch of scrambled eggs on toast (sorry Frugalites - it was bought bread - but a local baker!!) out of this and just one more egg - for the two of us. Oh and sorry - I forgot to take photos of it once it was all cooked up. My God it was good though. So thank you Keema and keep up the good work.  She's only missed one day since that post - all pretty consistent around the 78g mark. The other two lay about 5 a week each. I'm keeping a tally so I can look back over the years. We got about 51/2 dozen in September. You can see how I'm progressing in my quest to build a food forest too by clicking on the Harvest Diary tab at the top of this page :)

And now for the lessons. Every journey towards growing your own food is full of lessons, and I've just learnt a big one. Don't let your seed trays dry out and DO use good seed raising mix.  All of the gardening gurus in books and in Blogland say so, but little Miss Greenie got a bit over-confident didn't she?

You might remember me blogging about asking my daughter to make a mercy dash to check on the chooks and water the seedlings?  Well, if they were already seedlings they made it, and if they were in the good seed raising mix in the bucket - they came up anyway, but those I potted with a mix of seed raising mix, and soil from the gardener - NADA!  Well, that's unfair, I have three rockmelons, two sweetcorn, two zucchini (but I don't reckon one of them will last) a couple of struggling leeks and a few purple Basil - oh! a one tomato! That's it - out of 20 punnets!

I'm bowed but not beaten. So, all that soil will be unceremoniously tossed into a little nook in the garden to see if anything eventuates. Meantime, I will pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again.

This time, I'm going to plant some in punnets and some straight into the ground - and see what happens.  This can be the beginning of my planting diary, which I will also put on the tabs at the top so you can see what's happening.

Wish me luck! I've heard from a few blog-friends, like Our Gang of 7 and Outback Tania that they struggle too with planting seeds into punnets. What about you - any secrets to share?

Take care
Greenie x