sowing seeds

I started sowing my stash of seeds today.  I vary the catalogues I buy from in the years when I buy seeds, for a change of list, and there's always a great pile of free packets that came with magazines, some useful and others varieties I wouldn't give house (or rather garden) room to.  This year was the turn of Chiltern Seeds and for the first time I'm trying Derry Watkins' Special Plants Nursery.  Other years I use Thompson and Morgan, Mr Fothergill, DT Brown or Plant World Seeds.  I haven't noticed that one firm produces consistently better or worse germination than another.  The main variables seem to be the compost and the weather.  After last year's disappointing growth, when most pots germinated but several utterly failed to make any further progress, I'm not bothering with a special low nutrient seed compost but simply giving it a go in my usual brand of multi-purpose.

I usually do the main sowing in the second week of February.  After I'd finished for the day I read the leaflet that Derry Watkins enclosed with her order, and discovered that she recommends leaving tender plants until April or May when light levels are higher.  Ah well, too late.  I've found the problem with April sowings is that it only takes one hot day when I'm out for them to cook.  Not that I don't paint the greenhouse with shading paint, but there can be a lot of heat in the sun by May, and keeping the temperature in a domestic greenhouse at an equable level for tiny seedlings when you aren't there to damp the floor down at lunchtime can be tricky.  So I'd rather my sowings had graduated to the level of young plants by then, able to take a little more stress on the odd occasion.  I ignore Chiltern's sternly worded advice to use a soil based seed compost as well.  I've tried John Innes, never got on with it.

I didn't start actually sowing until after lunch, because up to that point I was shuffling trays around to make space, and cleaning any dead leaves off the overwintering plants.  They act as magnets for botrytis, and it's a job I should have done before, though actually things weren't looking too bad.  A few weeds had sprung up in some of the pots since the autumn, and I had those too while I was at it.

The depressing task was sorting through the trays of bulbs that the mice had got at.  I haven't had the heart to go through my list of last autumn's orders and see exactly what I've lost, but it's quite a few things.  The autumn flowering crocus and small species tulips were safe, because I put those in large propagating cases from the start, but mice managed to get inside a smaller case and destroy some fritillaries, and have eaten things they never showed an interest in before, Muscari, Scilla, Puschkinia, Corydalis and Erythronium.  They even excavated one of the pots of hyacinths that were tucked under the bench to keep them from the worst of the winter weather, ripping off the leaves and well-developed bud to eat the top of the bulb, and reducing my neat quincunx to an irregular foursome.  I am beginning to take this personally and to hate the mice with a passion. Next year everything apart from the daffodils is going to have to go under cover, and I might even seal the lids on to the trays with gaffer tape.

I don't know what to do about the hyacinths, other than make space for them up high and set traps beneath.  Which is a nuisance, since room in the light is at a premium in the greenhouse during the winter, and bulbs are perfectly happy in the darkness under the bench, if only things wouldn't eat them.  Thank goodness daffodils are poisonous and the mice don't seem to touch them.  Though who on earth confuses them with onions?  They don't smell remotely like onions, either raw or cooked (not that I have ever cooked a daffodil but I'm sure it doesn't suddenly start tasting like onions).  No, I am with The Now Show, and anyone daft enough to eat a daffodil deserves a Darwin Award and will be doing the rest of the human race a favour by removing themselves from the gene pool.  I make an exception for small children who will eat anything, but they aren't going to be shopping in the supermarket vegetable aisles and wouldn't be able to read the warning notices anyway.