Thursday 2 April 2015

sowing seeds, planting bulbs

Finally the wind dropped, and I was able to go and sow some more vegetable seeds, and make a start with the flowers for cutting.  I realised as I began that I had no idea how long to make the rows or how large the patches of the cutting flowers.  Would a four foot row of Calendula, the width of the bed, give me about the right quantity of flowers, or so many I'd be pressing bunches of marigolds on my friends whenever I saw them, as well as eggs?  And how densely should I sow, to allow for losses in the uncontrolled open ground of the vegetable patch?

My ideas about how many vegetable plants to try and grow to meet the needs of two people are scarcely more accurate.  Vegetables seem so entirely in the lap of the gods anyway.  The last time I got a decent courgette crop I tempted fate by buying a little recipe book called What Shall I do with All These Courgettes.  Hubris followed, and I have never successfully grown courgettes since. Still, I sowed some leeks, turnips, beetroot and peas.  In the past I've started leeks in modules in the greenhouse, but I'm really tight for space in there, not to mention the root aphid problem, and the packet said you could sow them in a drill outdoors, so I thought I'd give it a try.  Note to self: the carrots, turnips and leeks will all need fleecing against their respective pests, if they ever come up.

I planted some Ranunculus corms for cutting, bought from Peter Nyssen, orange and pink ones. They came in a minimum quantity of 25, which seemed like an awful lot when I opened the packets, and I wondered whether to keep some to plant later to try and stagger the flowering period, but didn't know if they would keep or would simply dry out.  They are funny looking little things.  I was expecting a knobbly tuber like Anemone, but Ranunculus turn out to have lots of little fleshy roots, like a miniature cross between an Eremurus and a shuttlecock.

As I scraped planting drills in the beds and tried not to think about the crop of weeds that would shortly appear I realised that I not only didn't know how many plants to grow for flowers, I had no idea when any of them would be ready to pick.  I re-read Sarah Raven's book on the cutting garden before ordering my seeds, but whether any of my carefully chosen combinations will actually happen at the same time so that I can display them together in a vase is anybody's guess.

I have grave doubts about my cheap Cyclamen cilicium though, now that I've seen them.  This species is more or less hardy in southern England, though not so easy and cast iron guaranteed as C. coum and C. hederifolium, and it likes a little more sun than some cyclamen (so the books say).  I have one in the gravel in front of the house that is doing reasonably OK, and as I gazed in wrath one day at the scruffy mess of self seeded bladder campion that had taken up residence at the foot of that wall, it struck me that what I wanted was not a weedy and rampant wildflower, but a carpet of cyclamen.  Peter Nyssen were offering them for a very modest amount, far less than I had paid for my existing plant, and I ordered ten.

The parcel arrived yesterday, and as I opened the bags with the cyclamen in it I realised two things.  The flattened, knobbly disc that I fished out of its surrounding sawdust looked very dried out, and I remembered that cyclamen do not like drying out and wondered how many of the ten would ever come back to life.  The second thing I realised was that I did not have a clue which way up to plant them.  Google was little help.  Which way up to plant cyclamen was out there as a topic, but generally focused on the better known species.  I gathered that the side with old growth coming out of it should go on top, but some of these tubers had wispy growth and lumps on both sides.  The concave side was the top, the convex the underneath, but most of my newly acquired wizened discs didn't have detectable concavities.  The website of The Cylamen Society acknowledged that it could be very difficult to tell which the top was and warned that I might end up having to take pot luck, and so I did with some of them.

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