Germination

Well, that didn't take long -- I filled and sowed the trough, and squirrels/birds have almost immediately come down and started tossing the fresh earth out :-(
(Maybe I should try a mini-scarecrow consisting of a few sticks with streamers of cloth on; I had my socks hanging over there for about three days and had no trouble during that period...)

So far I have germination in the pak choi in the mini-greenhouse, I *did* have germination in the trough (there seem to be a few surviving sprouts round the edge...), and, somewhat embarrassingly, I appear to have germination in the chillies in the kitchen, which are now likely to get extremely aetiolated! I wasn't expecting them to make any move for at least a week, or maybe two.

I'm assuming these seedlings really are chillies, and not just some random fast-growing weed seed that happened to be in the soil I used -- there is at least one more deeply-buried seedling that I can see through the transparent sides of the pot which ddefinitely *isn't* a chilli, being far too big. Probably another calendula. But the current crop are all about the right size to be chilli seedlings, and all coming up the same...

It's alive!

Two more of the 'empty' narcissus pots now have tiny little bulb-blade-leaves pushing up (not from the old topknot of the bulb but from somewhere further down and alongside it), and there are more coming up from at least one other bulb in the first pot. They are miles behind all the daffodils busy emerging in parks and gardens, but they are definitely alive and putting out new growth.

(Something has germinated in the dill pot in the mini-greenhouse, but going by the seed-case I'm pretty sure it isn't dill -- and I'm getting increasingly sceptical about the putative chillies as well!)