More seeds and seedlings

The beans have now been transplanted into individual pots and after making sure they survived, moved to live outside.
We are still seeing a great germination rate - the courgette seedlings are just about to ping up straight and more herbs are coming through, it is just parsley that we are waiting for now. We also finally have some seedlings growing in the soil bed outside so there are some sunflowers and mange-tout hopefully growing steadily now.
Another set of carrot and lettuce seedlings have been sown in a 'bag for life' and a pot respectively outside in order to continue our existing supply and some more mange-tout and sweetcorn have been started off inside in case the outdoor seeds don't do too well.
Due to the poll results we have ordered a potato set which includes reusable growing bags and four different varieties of potato sets.

A confession...

On a quest for a better watering rose so as not to damage or drown our little seedlings I noticed some reduced onion and shallot sets so bought a pack of each. Thankyou to everyone that voted on our poll but we have now planted some onions and a couple of shallots. Most were past they'r best but we should have enough to last a while as you can store them easily. They look quite funny as they are basically mini onions and you have to plant them with the top poking out of the soil just enough so that birds can't get hold of them but they get enough sun to grow. So thats our little confession, we'll still be looking at the poll for our next lot of sowing though!

Our indoor seeds are continuing to do very well, the climbing beans have shot up and are by far the biggest plant we have now! They are quite interesting to watch too, the stems are alot thicker than any other shoots we've had and they ping up really slowly shedding an outer layer to reveal bright green leaves which open to about an ih in diameter! We planted two seeds in each pot but will need to give them individual pots at the weekend as the roots have already reached the bottom of the pot. The lettuce, tomato, carrot and sweetpea seedlings seem to be doing well and we can now see the first shoots of our peppers and some of the herbs: chives, sweet basil, basil neoploitan and coriander have all germinated. We also have a couple of different strawberry varieties which have been repotted and added to the existing plants - breakfasts will be yummy once they and the blueberry bushes bear fruit!
Unfortunately the seeds we planted in the ground still don't seem to have germinated as the nights are still going down to 1 or even 0 degrees so we are going to sow some in pots inside instead and if the original seeds do eventually germinate it'l be a bonus!

Pictures

Thought we'd add a few photos of our progress so far:

Lettuce seedlings:

Our new blueberry plants, Bluecrop in the foreground and Chandler behind it.

Close-up of the budding blueberries:

The week old tomato seedlings:

The solution to our fruit problem

An exciting new development has meant that we can now hope to have a plentiful supply of fruit as well as vegetables, after previously resigning to the latter alone due to the British climate not quite being suited to growing bananas and oranges. One of the garden centres in Norwich is open late on a thursday evening so we headed over after dinner for a browse and to pick up some free pots as they have a box outside where you can recycle old pots. We saw that they had a 3 for 2 deal on all seeds so we decided to get some courgette and leek seeds to add to our collection. The third pack of seeds was the cause of our excitement...we discovered that there is a variety of melon that can be grown in the UK! Also managed to bag a stack of pots that looked hardly used from the box outside.

Matt also discovered a small nursery, called Woodgate Nusery (http://www.woodgatenursery.co.uk/) near work selling individual plants ready to be planted out into bigger pots or soil, including berries, a variety of vegetables and plenty of flowers. This is great because in the bigger garden centres we found that you could only get trays of 6-12 plants rather than individual ones, especially as Matt came home on Friday with three strawberry plants and two garlic plants!

Today we went back out to the nursery so that we could both have a look round and having done some research decided to buy a couple of blueberry plants (bluecrop and chandler) to add to our fruit collection. The man running the place was really helpful and even gave us a couple of bigger pots for free to replant the blueberries in. We also had to get some ericacious soil for them which is more acidic than normal compost. Back at the ranch we got to work replanting the blueberry, strawberry and garlic plants and sowing the melon, courgette and leeks in small individual pots. The melon and courgette are being added to the various seedlings on windowsills inside and the rest are outside. The tomato count is now up to 15 and we are starting to see some sweet pea shoots poking through the compost so along with the fruit plants our garden should be looking colourful in no time.

Finally, we have decided to keep track of seed prices, dates of sowing, the first shoots appearing and planting out, and the yields we get so that we can calculate the costs compared with buying from a supermarket or greengrocers.

It just keeps getting better, two of the tomato plants have germinated along with lots more lettuce. We'll be feasting in no time.

Yay, we have lettuce. Went out to water this evening and found some little green shoots poking out of the soil.

More sowing

As expected at least one set of cat prints in the freshly dug soil! First to go in were some cauliflower plants we got at the garden centre yesterday. We put them in in two rows, roughly 40cm apart. We also put in a row of sweetcorn seeds, a row of sunflower seeds and a row of mange-tout seeds. We stamped a few holes into an empty mushroom tub and planted some pepper seeds and put it inside on the window sill to germinate. We also put a selection of herb seeds into indivdual pots - chives, sweet basil, basil neopol, corriander and parsley. Finally we started some french beans in small pots indoors.

We were very busy today doing lots of planting and looking forward to seeing some green shoots soon!

Lots of digging

Phew, that was hard work digging out all the grass. On the plus side the border is looking lovely, totally weed free and ready to go - a fresh invitation to cats everywhere! Off to watch Doctor Who so the new seeds will have to wait until tomorrow.

The Big Discovery

Ok, was having a poke around the garden when to our suprise discovered that the overgrown patch of grass was concealing a border running down the length of the garden! Having been resigned to pots and containers it was most exciting and very much increases our chances of reaching our goal!

With exciting discovery in hand it is off to the garden centre, again - this time for tools and a few more seeds. Having watched Edible Gardener on BBC Two we are thinking of getting some peas and beans on the grow.

Still no sign of germination but we did get some free pepper seeds with BBC Good Food magazine. We are hoping to use our veg to make some of the recipes in the magazine as they often have seasonal ideas.

Keep checking them but they still haven't grown - apparently it takes longer than an hour!

The adventure begins...

Welcome to our gardening adventure! We are going to attempt to turn our boring city garden into a haven of vegetable production. Our aim is to grow enough veg to be self-sufficient for at least two months out of the remaining year (2010), plus, have lots of fun along the way. P.S. The only things we have grown previously are sunflowers and cress - this is going to be interesting!

Being a city garden we are going to need to grow our vegetables in pots, containers, in fact anything that we can punch holes in the bottom of and fill with compost. We've just got back from the garden centre (where we also found a great selection of yummy cheeses in the adjacent farm shop) having bought a few pots, lots of compost and some sweet pea seeds to add some colour and fragrance to our veggie garden. We already have a bunch of seeds from the BBC Dig In campaign, a great way to get started.

So, to start off we filled the large (9") pots with compost and sowed 1 pot with carrots, 1 pot with lettuce and 2 with the sweet peas. We put these straight outside and gave them a good watering - they were thirsty seeds! On the inside we put some tomato seeds into a seed tray and popped it on our kitchen window sill where it would be a bit warmer.

Now we must sit and wait for them to grow!