Winter veg - purple sprouting broccoli

Planted up the winter veg - purple sprouting broccoli.  It's only a small space, so limited to what 'winter veg' I can grow without intruding into early season veg.

This year's crop was great this year and hopefully the pigeons, cats and other beasties won't destroy or damage them before they get a chance to grow.  It's good value as after picking the initial flowering head, secondary shoots appear.

Tomatoes and beans

The runner beans are growing nicely and not yet munched by slugs and snails.  Tomatoes also settling in nicely - ranging in size from beef to cherry.

And finally, the square bed with courgettes and mangetout plus netting and prunings from the rose to deter cats.

 

Seedlings

Pleased to see that most of the bean seedlings have come up - runner beans, french beans and now the mangetout, which came up really quickly.

Disappointingly, only a few of the 'Yellow Pear' tomato seedlings have come up, none of the 'Gardener's Delight' and none of the lemon cucumber or cucamelon - unless they're just much slower to germinate.  Apart from the cucamelon - these were all from Seedy Sunday.

So far none of the flower seeds have germinated but the weeds are doing well.

More seed planting

Mainly flower seeds as there are lots of different varieties I discovered when sorting through my seed store - I might as well use them up and have a bit of colour this Summer.

Runners and french beans have germinated - nearly all of them but still a few to emerge or not - they were new seed.

Only a couple of tomato seedlings have come up.  Hoping more will appear as the weather warms up (?), although so many other seedlings are appearing it's difficult to work out what is the original seed I planted and what has just sprouted out of the compost.

Planted up some mange-tout seeds and purchased a few tomato plants last weekend at Plumpton, a courgette and a couple of cape gooseberry plants.

A colourful selection

Lovely handful of colours - picked fresh for lunch in the spring sunshine.  The last few stems of the purple sprouting broccoli and mixed colours of the chard leaves.

Still a few handfuls to go before the chard bolts and supplementing my Live Below The Line 5 day Challenge this week.

Sowing seeds for 2013

I don't often sow seeds - both because in my small garden I don't need that many plants and also because I haven't had much success in the past.

However after this year's Seedy Sunday - I have plenty of seed to play with.  So - I've planted up:

Runner beans - and old favourite, although I'm not sure what variety as they weren't labelled.

French beans - also unnamed.

Tomato - Gardeners Delight and Yellow Pear.  The tiniest of seeds but as I seem to grow tomato plants quite well in my compost, these should be OK.

Lemon Cucumber - they were lovely before when I've grown them.

Cucamelon - one of James Wong's selections - a mix between cucumber and melon, with a hint of lime.

Any seeds in the shed seem to have been got at by mice.  Most of them were pretty old, so a sort out was needed - bean and peas seem to have been popular.  At least sorting through them made me realise just what a variety of seeds I had - veg and flowers.

Will sow up a few more pots and see what comes up.

Freshly picked broccoli

The broccoli I planted last year has been growing steadily since the Autumn and survived the cold and snow (and cats), earlier this year.

Picked this fresh for lunch with a fishcake - simply steamed - tasted delicious and great to be picking fresh veg from the garden at this time of year.