People talk about nurturing seedlings like they are babies. They are of course baby plants so that make sense.  They also talk about the excitement when they see them grow. I can always do with a little excitement here at Domestic Executive HQ.
My spreadsheet (ok, I lied, my scribbles on the back of an envelope) told me exactly when my seeds should be germinating so monitoring progress against my scribbles has been a daily routine. Ok, I lied again, it’s been a twice daily routine. Each morning and evening my seeds have been given the once over lightly a mist of water and a quick poem recital (you just don’t know if Prince Charles was right or not). If the seeds are lucky they get an extra pleasure of a basset sniff.
When you have control freakery tendencies it can be a real challenge to allow nature take it’s course but I like to think that I’m learning and growing as a person as I tackle this food production lark. It’s with great pleasure I can announce that seeds planted and nurtured do indeed grow.
Some grow better than others – but they will learn not to mess with me like that. Talking about mess, this growing lark requires dexterity, precision and patience all of which are characteristics I have to work a little harder at. With plenty of paper, trays and other paraphenalia to capture the mess I was convinced that my growing corner in the spare bedroom window would be easy. My experience to date suggests that a greenhouse is better.
With the impending arrival of special guests from the UK the spare room needs to be vacated so I’ve moved my growing operations to the barn where there is a plenty of light from the roof sky lights. A little more room and no carpet to worry about. This manouvre though is not without it’s risks.
Vermin live in our barn – they gorge themselves on grain for the chicken and then lumber around dragging their oversized bellies with them. The bassets have yet to catch them though so a fat slow moving mouse is still too fast for Fortnum and Mason. It seems mice are partial to a little greenery too and stuck their snouts in my lettuce pots.
The mousetraps are out now with some luscious peanut butter on so hopefully that will distract them enough to allow my seedlings to grow. Failing that I’ll have to intice a feral cat in for a while.
I’ve sowed some more seeds to keep the food harvest flowing. A long hot summer is required if we’re to realise the true potential of our efforts though as we’re so behind the required propogation timescales. The good news is that by the time my seedlings are ready to be planted there will be a sparkly new kitchen garden to be their new home.
That just leaves me to start rethinking the potager and migrating crops to salads and herbs as originally intend. No time to contemplate that now so it’ll be added to the blackboard list of things to do. Kick off on the new kitchen garden should be late this week or early next. You can be sure that I’ll be sharing my excitement about all of that.