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igenlodeIt has been warm, and I have been sowing seeds and giving my tomatoes holidays outside. It has also been very cold at night, with a white frost, and I had to put the extra blanket back on top of my bed! To my relief the rocket and lettuce seedlings survived the cold all right, and everything else was still safe beneath the soil...
When I ceremonially opened the single orange long-headed poppy seed-pod that I managed to ripen last year, it turned out to be totally empty.
Ah well, this is why we keep seeds on a two-year rotating window... Sowed some of last year's seed; the single surviving plant has over-wintered.
The yellow poppy also over-wintered, and as I made no attempt to transplant it this time, it is looking more vigorous than usual for this time of year! (The ants are back, though.)
I have fronded California poppy seedlings coming up all over the place (likewise the oriental/opium poppies), so I haven't bothered to sow any -- I even have some of them germinating where I want them, back in the original tray under the now somewhat elderly plants where presumably seed was dropped! But I did sow a pot of the marked-as-white California poppy seed, from the plant that I tied a snippet of wool around, so we shall have another go at seeing whether this is a genetic quirk that breeds true or not.
Some of the strawberry plants are showing signs of life (though at least one appears to have had its new growth eaten off, and is trying again to put out a fresh set of leaves). Some of them look as if they may have died over the winter.
I soaked a dozen or so dwarf peas and they are now in a newspaper jar, but have shown no signs of sprouting just yet. I also sowed a tray with the last of the assorted purple flower seed, though so far as I remember it didn't come up terribly purple and didn't appear to contain any of the listed species other than cornflowers! Certainly most of the seed remaining in the packet looks like cornflower tufts, though they may simply be the biggest...
I couldn't find any suitable subdivided trays for sowing multiple small pinches of seed (goodness knows what happened to that old sweet tray that I was using last year -- and I don't even have any empty egg-boxes at the moment), so ended up making four small newspaper pots using my little spice jar as a former, and sowing Gypsophila elegans, Gypsophila vaccaria, Swan River daisy and pink Linaria seed. Winnowing out the seeds from the crushed dry seed-pods (thus vastly reducing the bulk of the envelopes) took most of the afternoon -- especially in the case of the Linaria, where the little black seeds were so tiny that when you sieved them the seeds were what went *through* the hair sieve while the 'chaff' stayed behind... but only a small proportion of it, unfortunately. Really it would have been more practical just to keep those seeds in their nice little capsules; probably all that I achieved was to disseminate random stray seeds across all the other pots!
When I ceremonially opened the single orange long-headed poppy seed-pod that I managed to ripen last year, it turned out to be totally empty.
Ah well, this is why we keep seeds on a two-year rotating window... Sowed some of last year's seed; the single surviving plant has over-wintered.
The yellow poppy also over-wintered, and as I made no attempt to transplant it this time, it is looking more vigorous than usual for this time of year! (The ants are back, though.)
I have fronded California poppy seedlings coming up all over the place (likewise the oriental/opium poppies), so I haven't bothered to sow any -- I even have some of them germinating where I want them, back in the original tray under the now somewhat elderly plants where presumably seed was dropped! But I did sow a pot of the marked-as-white California poppy seed, from the plant that I tied a snippet of wool around, so we shall have another go at seeing whether this is a genetic quirk that breeds true or not.
Some of the strawberry plants are showing signs of life (though at least one appears to have had its new growth eaten off, and is trying again to put out a fresh set of leaves). Some of them look as if they may have died over the winter.
I soaked a dozen or so dwarf peas and they are now in a newspaper jar, but have shown no signs of sprouting just yet. I also sowed a tray with the last of the assorted purple flower seed, though so far as I remember it didn't come up terribly purple and didn't appear to contain any of the listed species other than cornflowers! Certainly most of the seed remaining in the packet looks like cornflower tufts, though they may simply be the biggest...
I couldn't find any suitable subdivided trays for sowing multiple small pinches of seed (goodness knows what happened to that old sweet tray that I was using last year -- and I don't even have any empty egg-boxes at the moment), so ended up making four small newspaper pots using my little spice jar as a former, and sowing Gypsophila elegans, Gypsophila vaccaria, Swan River daisy and pink Linaria seed. Winnowing out the seeds from the crushed dry seed-pods (thus vastly reducing the bulk of the envelopes) took most of the afternoon -- especially in the case of the Linaria, where the little black seeds were so tiny that when you sieved them the seeds were what went *through* the hair sieve while the 'chaff' stayed behind... but only a small proportion of it, unfortunately. Really it would have been more practical just to keep those seeds in their nice little capsules; probably all that I achieved was to disseminate random stray seeds across all the other pots!