…is to wander around DIY emporiums and garden centres and flower shows (Chelsea and Hampton Court I’m looking at you)  and acquire pretty things for the garden.  This includes, but is not limited to: garden ornaments, garden pots of varying sizes, tea lights and candle sticks and lanterns, plants (obviously)  and numerous packets of seeds.

Which is all very well until you consider that my garden is a small (and I do mean small) urban garden with a limited amount of space (see more in the about section). Most of the back garden is now turned over to veg growing, bar one  6×3 ft bed of ornamental plants and the containers on the fire-escape steps. (I live in the upper floor of an Edwardian terrace conversion with a fire-escape leading from my bathroom into the back garden)!

The front garden is a typical terrace front garden, we have enough room for two bins and a raised bed which is about 12 feet long x 2 wide. And uh…a number of containers.

All of which means I’ve rather overdone it with the seeds over the last *cough* substantial number of years and I MUST not buy any more.

This is just the stash of flower seeds as I was part way through sorting them all out. I’d managed to get as far as grouping them by flower type. There are packets of sunflowers (I don’t have room to grow giant sunflowers!), nasturtiums, stocks, nicotiana (alas the giant ones not the dwarf varieties!), morning glory (Ipomoea) , lots of packets of sweet pea (I may have gone a little mad at Chelsea last year), not  to mention at the bottom left about 6-8 packs of “throw and grow” wildflower mixes.  Then there’s the coleus and on the right some Joshua tree seeds and other conservatory/houseplants.

Luckily S has a large garden he is in the process of re-doing and has agreed to let me turn on bed over to the “throw & grow” wildflowers.

I’ve sorted out some of the older packs and will see whether they’ll germinate this year or whether I do need to get rid of them.

Having sorted everything out (I did the veg stash on Friday) this is what I’ve ended up with!

The box on the left is going back up to the attic to be stored until next year. And I will be flagging my diary/calendar to sow early! There’s a large number of flower (on the left of the box) and vegetable/herb (on the right of the box) seeds which should plenty to be going on with!

The box on the right has packets of flower, veg, herb and conservatory seeds which need to be sown this year. I’ve already sown about 1/4 of these:  hardy varieties of salad leaves (lettuce, mustard, rocket, pak choi, mizuna and others) which have gone into the slightly shady bed dedicated to leafy green veg. More about that in a future post!

And a couple of days ago I planted some beans and courgettes in a non-heated propagator (which are sprouting already). I love courgettes – indestructible as triffids, with colonising tendencies and produce masses of fruit (which stored well) with the minimum of fuss. More about courgettes later!