It’s that fabulous time of year when Spring seems to be dancing into Summer, when I can wander around with my tattoos out (the ones on my arms, anyway) and I can scatter some seeds into buckets and bags and pop back a few weeks later to some home grown goodness. Regular readers will know that I’ve grown herbs and chillies on my window sill for a few years now – my saving grace when I had a very small budget for storecupboard ingredients and frozen veg – and this year I branched out into growing Other Things. I wanted to do simple things, that are usually pricey to buy in the shops, but easy to grow…
At the moment, we have radishes (‘bright lights’ in jewel colours of deep purple, bright yellow and fuschia, and ‘french breakfast’, long and pointed with shocking pink fading into a bright white). We also have a LOT of parsley, basil, rocket, cavolo, one strawberry plant out of 30 seeds (something went a little wrong somewhere), mint, a lot of salad leaves, and a few sticks of rhubarb clinging in from last year.
We’ve also planted roots in a vegetable patch – little round carrots, potatoes, split up and planted a garlic clove, dwarf beans, and perpetual spinach – I’ll keep you posted on those!
And I’m lucky enough to have some outdoor space to grow things this year, but radishes will do well on a sunny window ledge (I always ignore the spacing instructions on the backs of packets of seeds and just toss them in, seems to work for me, I’ve had 130 of the things so far…). Salad leaves will also do well indoors, and herbs. Most things will grow well in a bucket, cheaper to buy from hardware stores than fancy flower pots, just stab a few holes in it with a skewer or knife to allow them to drain.
You can also use old drinks bottles and milk bottles as propagators for growing indoors. Cut the bottle in half horizontally, make a few holes in the bottom for drainage, fill the bottom half with soil and compost, plant the seeds, and pop the top back on to make an indoor greenhouse to germinate your seeds. I tried this last year and didn’t get around to blogging about it – but it works really well, and the 2l drinks bottles are the perfect size for popping on a window ledge all in a row. I’ll try to find some pics from last year and post them up here – I planted out my chilli plant into one to shield it from the winter cold, and it was a very happy and productive little chilli plant!
Jack.
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