It’s our first growing season with a propagator, shed and a greenhouse, and it is so exciting to see so much life starting to take shape. We have been planting peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, lots of lettuce, nasturtiums, spring onions, beetroot, chilli, purple sprouting broccoli and loads more! Hopefully the shelves won’t fill up too soon and we can keep going.
In fact, we have already harvested and experimented with microgreens, (sunflower, basil, radish and rocket) and look forward to growing plenty more for our plate and yours. They’re densely planted and cut within a week or two, at their most tender and nutritious stage.
Spring is sooooo close, we can almost taste it, and our veg beds will be formed and planted with all these goodies. There have been a few hurdles however, the most serious of which is that the green waste compost supplier ran out of ready compost, just as we were geared up for an intense period of groundworks, track laying and compost spreading! So, the plant hire (mechanical, not organic) was postponed and the compost is due in mid March. Never mind, these setbacks are to be expected. We are going to move about 30+ tonnes of compost this year, which is quite an undertaking to say the least! It’ll all be worth the effort when the harvesting starts.
Along with the excitement is a sprinkling of fear of the unknown, and a knowing that things will become ever more challenging as this year progresses. Still, the seedlings don’t seem to be phased, so I’ll try and take a leaf out of their book and just keep chipping away at it. Even the old packets of seeds I’m trying to use up from previous seasons are going strong, surely a good sign.