Growing – Page 9

Growing veg on my roof garden is only meaningful up to a certain point. You couldn’t pretend it was a substantial amount of food or that it was making a dent in your shopping bill. It’s for laughs really. To that end I like to plant to a lot of flowers with the focus on ones which the bugs like. And they love Limanthes which is sometimes called poached egg plant because it has a yellow bit in the middle and a white rim. Geddit?

^{Limanthes in bloom early last summer.}

Last autumn I collected the seed of the flower and stowed them away in the dark in a jar. The Limanthes jar is here in the centre with my saved Poppy seeds and saved Borage which I also planted yesterday. Yesterday was an auspicious day to plant because it was three days before the full moon.

^{Home-grown Poppy, Limanthes, and Borage in jars.}

Because I was a bit lazy when I gathered the seed it was mixed up with a load of other shite. Twigs and stuff. So I had the opportunity to winnow it. I scrunched it all up and blew the chaff away.

Then I stuffed them in pots and marked them “LIM”. The temptation is to overplant because you’ve got so much seed. Which I probably succumbed to. Though it’s supposed to keep it’s not going to be so lively next year and you don’t want to waste it. Home-saved seed is supposed to be particularly vigorous, these little guys know the scene and they’re back for more action. We’ll see.

^{Is this a jungle? It just came alive and took him.}

^{It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.}

The last frost here in London is towards the end of March. If you were to plant seeds outdoors after that point you’d have to wait a while to get a vegetable you could eat. Therefore you plant seedlings earlier indoors in the warmth, and get a head start. And then you transplant them outdoors as soon as it’s a bit warmer because a frost will kill many types of seedlings. I use some cheap LED grow lights because there’s not enough light on my window ledge. In theory it would be good to have a greenhouse but I don’t have enough space for one. Furthermore this early in the year you’d need to heat a green house somehow. I heat my study already because I work here. Therefore, on balance, I think it’s justifiable.

If you don’t have enough light the seedlings get “leggy”. The poor things are stretching themselves up higher to reach a light they perhaps assume is just out of reach; like they think they are under a pile of leaves or summat. And then they fall over. This, below, is my leggy seedlings last year – terrible. But you know they planted just fine outdoors and grew into big healthy beetroot. You just bury them and their stems a little deeper in the soil. I’m not going to have that problem this year. In fact I’m pretty happy with how they are looking.

I’m planting all my seeds in soil blocks which are like home-made chocolate brownies. You could make them just as easily squeezing the soil into a little ball and popping the seed in the top. That’s apparently how lots of native peoples do it. Maybe I’ll try that in the next batch. I plant a lot of beetroot because it’s maybe my favourite vegetable. I like to roast it. Delicious.