The Growing Challenge – Seeds Seeds Seeds!

My Eden Seeds order has arrived and man they were fast! A nice little box filled with seedy goodness, now I can really get started on the Growing Challenge…. yay!

The plan is to plant a round of early seeds and then do a later round in the hope that we may get some early-ish and some later harvests. In our area we get frost right into November and our summer season seems to stretch later than most of the books seem to think it will. Last spring/summer we didn’t get any ripe tomatoes until March and were still harvesting in late April! I’d dearly like to be eating our own tomatoes this summer rather than buying them up until Autumn!

Today was the day. I had planned to do this with the girls but this week has just been crazy with so much stuff on and with no end to the busy schedule in sight, that I knew if I didn’t get some seeds in now it would be the end of September before we’d manage it and I’d have failed at my plan to start early yet again. So the small boy and I did it together… well ok he sat in the high chair and taste tested one of the cardboard pots while I planted.

So this is what we’ve planted for our first round of seeds –

Zucchini Black Beauty- we have huge success with these, they’ve never failed us yet!
Water Melon Golden Midget – we have some success with these previous years
Water Melon Shining Light – a new variety for us!
Rock melon Minnesota Midget – last year these didn’t do so well but the year before they were amazing!
Pumpkin Turks Turban – not the sweetest pumpkin but they grow well, store forever and look cool!
Pumpkin Butternut – a new variety this year, we also have one other variety of pumpkin to plant that we saved seeds from last year but I forget what it is called
Squash – we’ve never grown squash before but we all like to eat them so are hoping they do well.
Luffa – Not sure exactly how huge this will grow in our climate but look out family and friends because next year you’ll all be getting luffa’s for Christmas!
Cucumber Mini Muncher – another new variety for us. We’ve never had huge success with cucumbers but the girls LOVE them so I keep trying… any tips greatly appreciated!
Cucumber Japanese Climbing – I think we watered this to death last year (leaky watering pipe) so I am crossing my fingers it might do better this year.
Tomato Tommy Toe – our good all round tomato. These are only small (for us anyway) but tasty.
Tomato Mortgage Lifter – we got one or two BIG tomatoes from this last year but we had a fungal (I think) issue with our tomatoes last year and think we have learnt some lessons and hopefully will get a better yield this year.

These were all planted in toilet rolls or little cardboard pots and put on my kitchen window sill where it is nice and sunny and where I will see them so I remember to water them! I also planted out some borage, cone flower and lemon balm seeds – just a couple of the flowers and herbs I want to grow in and around the veggies this year. Oh and we also planted a tomato, cucumber and zucchini for a friend who’s patiently waiting the arrival of their third child – I know from experience that new babies and seed raising is hard so these will sit on our window sill until they are ready to go into their little veggie garden.

I have a couple more things I’d like to plant out now but we only remembered to save the toilet rolls a couple of months back so only had ten or so on hand. The toilet rolls worked so well last year – they don’t take up too much room on my window sill and being cardboard and having no bottom they just go straight in the ground so no worry about disturbing roots when it is time to plant. I’ll have to get a friends and family to collect some more for us in the next few weeks so I can plant out a big second round of seeds.

So now it is a matter of watching, watering and waiting till the first sprouts appear! Oh and getting stuck into the last few beds in the garden so we have somewhere to plant them all…. and figuring out where exactly we will plant them all…. oh and how to keep those pesky ear wigs from destroying my seedlings…. and maybe thinking about making a mini green house or some cloches for really early planting out… ah the work, and fun, never ends!

(darn – my camera battery is flat, I will take and post a photo later!)