Archive for April, 2012

Tomato seedlings everywhere…

The picture immediately below shows this year’s tomato seedlings as they were on April 8th, one week ago. The picture at the bottom shows them yesterday, after I’d spent a large part of the afternoon potting on the Brandywines. All the Brandywine seeds I saved came up, and there were over forty of them. I only threw a few of them away – as there’s no way I will have the room in the garden to grow forty Brandywine tomato plants (to say nothing of the three other varieties I’ve planted), I will have to find some willing recipients among the neighbours. First in line is the guy from round the corner who gave me an envelope filled with sunflower seeds a couple of weeks back. One good turn deserves another! They’re the sort of sunflowers that grow to enormous heights, and they will cheer up the front garden no end. I have planted half a dozen of the seeds in little pots in our mini greenhouse. Not the conventional way of doing it, but I know that if I put them straight in the ground the birds will have them in no time.

The planks of wood you can see outside in the second picture are the remains of our barrel, after which this blog is named. Sadly the wood finally rotted so much that it started to crumble away, and the barrel was a bit of an eyesore. Its place may at some point be taken over by our dustbin, which is no longer needed for storing rubbish since Thanet Council so generously gave us a wheelie bin. Don’t think I’ll be changing the name of the blog though… somehow “Beans in a Dustbin” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Planted my tomato seeds today

In keeping with my resolution from last year, I held off planting any tomato seeds until today, April 1st. Hopefully I won’t thus be stuck with a load of indoor seedlings that have gone leggy due to lack of sunlight. Although we’re getting some nice sunny days, it’s still quite cool and I’ve noticed that my spring onions (planted a good couple of weeks ago) still haven’t come up, presumably due to low temperatures. Well, I hope it’s due to low temperatures and not seed failure lol.

Anyway, tomato varieties planted today were: Gardener’s Delight (of course), Mamande, Moneymaker and the Brandywine seeds that I saved last year. Fingers crossed that they come up, because I’m already salivating at the thought of Brandywine tomato, mozzarella and basil salad. Long wait for that though. I will be splashing out on some more Tumbling Tom hanging basket tomato seeds, because they were so gorgeous last time.

Haven’t done any other gardening other than a massive tidy-up a couple of weeks back (and planting of the aforementioned spring onion seeds). The next project will be to transfer the contents of the barrel in our front garden into a galvanised dustbin, which is no longer needed for its original purpose because dear old Thanet Council has given us wheelie bins. The barrel has come to the end of its life – its wooden bits are rotting and it’s no longer an attractive thing at all. Maybe I will have more success at producing a viable courgette crop using the dustbin than I did with the barrel.