the time is now

Ive been meaning to sow seeds for some time now, and today at last the weather was pretty nice. No biting winds or miserable drizzle.

This year I've planted the sweet pea seeds in toilet roll tubes. Sweet peas have a long root so the tubes are ideal as well as being 'green', as they will be planted straight out, tubes and all.

In my heated propagator I have sown meconopsis (blue poppy type flower), nicotiana lime, phlox purple stripe, moluccella strange green thing! And these curly seeds calendula orange.

Sorry botanical names are boring and hard to remember!

Ive used organic peat free compost, which says its ok for seeds but I wasn't impressed, its more like a mulch. We shall see if these seeds don't germinate I'll try something else. I have a ton more to sow but its too early for some and too cold for others that will go directly in the soil. However I have sprinkled some poppy and nigella seeds already in the border.

The above is obviously my compost bin, which I find a pain, and didn't turn out at all last year!

Naughty me. I realise that for such a big garden this is a tiny composter. I did have a nice big open one like you see on gardeners world, then the rodents moved in! We put a wire mesh under the bin so they couldn't burrow, so now I use it for kitchen waste like veg/fruit peelings, teabags, egg shell and newspaper (shredded bills too). I dug a wedge out today and spread it on the veg patch.

I am toying with the idea of removing more grass, which means more plants!! No actually I have enough to fill this space already. I've been generally pottering around all areas of the garden, doing a bit of weeding and a bit of pruning, and thinking how do I cope with it all!