Seedling update

Wow, scorchio here in Norwich this week! I had yesterday off work - my big news is that I've just gone down to working 4 days a week, so will have more time for fun stuff like allotmenting (and chores and errands, not such fun). I'll usually have Wednesdays off but can change it if I need to.

My seeds are coming along quite well, the only casualties have been a few basils which look like they've succumbed to damping off (with a pinch of neglect) but as they were old packs of seeds I had sown quite thickly as I wasn't expecting a great germination. Plus the early basils I sowed last year didn't germinate at all if remember rightly, so I wasn't holding out much for them. I like the cute tiny new leaves.

Most of these photos are from the weekend, so a few days have passed since:

Basil - green and purple - There's a flopped one at the front where you can just see its thin shrivelled stem, likely from 'damping off'

The sweetcorn (sweet nugget F1) has germinated well, this photo after only a week. I put them in the lean-to covered all round in bubble wrap. It gets really warm in there when it's sunny, so the bubble wrap then keeps the heat in over night.

Here they are when covered over. There is a radiator behind them but that doesn't work (or at least, I've never tried it, I think it would burst water everywhere!)

The tomatoes are fine, a little bit of yellowing on the seedling leaves that could be due to the cold at night (I've been rather neglecting and not checking night time temps, just hoping for the best as I know it won't get frost in there). But on the whole I'm happy with them.

The squashes are ok too, I germinated them inside and then moved to the lean-to. I've runout of shelf space already (due to messiness) so have put them on the floor on upturned trays until I sort the shelves out, so they're not right at cold ground level. There's a chance I might have access to a bit of land at someone's house but it's quite far away, so I thought I could try planting loads of squashes there and they'd just ramble around the place

The squashes - I have another trayful too, far too many for just my allotment so we'll see if this bit of land works out. If not I'll be giving lots away.

I potted on my one chilli seedling, and 5 aubergines (more than one had germinated in each module so I carefully split them apart)

I've sown some more things this week like dill, runner and climbing beans (in loo roll tubes). I also made my own little seed mix up of old seeds of dill, radish and salad leaves. In the back garden I'd like to have more of a mixed / natural/ self seeding couple of beds so thought I'd start with this and just give it a go and see what happens. It was a tad windy though and I lost some seeds, who knows they might pop up somewhere!

The large flat seeds are dill, small round ones are radish, thin ones are salad

Jan's been asking me to sort out the patchy grass in the back garden so I thought I'd try chamomile and just bought a small pack to see what happened. I sowed the pack across two trays on Saturday and by yesterday (Weds) they'd already germinated in the warm lean to!

Chamomile tiny seedlings yesterday

My main challenge with most of my seedlings now is to make sure they either don't frazzle in the heat in the lean-to and that I don't over water them... hmmm, it could go either way! I do tend to be a bit haphazard and not check on things enough. We'll see what happens in the next few weeks!

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