Final February sowings

A bit of a lack of windowsill space, compounded by the complete lack of any greenhouse or even porch prompted us to invest in an Aldi 4-tier greenhouse (for the princely sum of €17.99). Putting the thing together was no problem at all, and we're pleasantly surprised by how sturdy the finished article was. Our main concern was that it may topple over in any wind so, despite the rather short tent-peg affair at the base, we also chucked in a couple of breeze blocks to lower the things centre of gravity as well. Inspired by the completed "greenhouse", a slightly larger walk model caught our eye in Woodies. At €40 its still not going to break the bank, and there appears to be enough room in it for at least a couple of gro-bags for some late-summer tomatoes. We'll give it a couple of weeks to see how the 4-tier one gets on before we take the plunge.

Of course, the new greenhouse needed to be filled, encouraging us to pretty much finish off out early-season sowings. Sowing this week included Summer Cabbage "Derby Day" and two tomatoes: an Italian plum tomato (Roma VF) and a tumbling cherry variety (Gartenperle). For the Pea "Meteor" we decided to compare the bog-roll pots (see previous entry) against some peat pots we found lying around. Firstly, the peat pots appeared to be far more fragile, with three not making it out the potting shed (no such fatalities for the cardboard tubes). Also, they took up a bit more room (only 16 fitted onto the tray compared to 18 for the bog-roll). We'll have to see how the rest of the season goes. We would have liked to try out newspaper pots as well (we got a newspaper-pot maker for Christmas), and probably will, but the pot maker hasn't been moved to the new house yet (and is probably still sitting in its box somewhere...).

Typically, after the previous posting, we managed to find a host of new and interesting websites to help budding gardeners. http://growireland.net/ has a load of blogs covering various aspects of gardening and growing-your own, with lots of useful hints and tips so well worth a perusal. http://organicgreenfingers.com/ contains lots of threads of advice, and offers of help if the info you're after isn't there. Finally, blotanical (http://www.blotanical.com/) hosts a load of garden blogs (including this one if I managed to register it correctly) - another great resource for those long evenings.