Planting Fruit and Veg Seeds

What better way to spend a wet and stormy weekend than buying and planting fruit and veg seeds.  Doing this made me feel so hopeful for the summer and warmer weather to come. 

I have never grown any vegetables from seed before, but I feel if I could get any of the seeds I have bought to grow and even better, bear fruit, this would be great for reducing the need to buy them.  Also a little bit of fun.  I love gardening but a lot of the garden is given over to grass or flowers so I am going to use pots and planters on the patio when the seeds are ready to go into the garden.  I am going to try some cucumbers (as it seems impossible to find them not in plastic) and some tomatoes, peas and strawberries.  I will plant some lettuces seeds directly in to pots outside in the garden later in the year.  We got our seeds from the local garden centre High Legh and indulged in a lovely lunch while we were there. 

Once we got the seeds home I went out and got some soil from the bottom of the compost bin.  Great to be able to do this and avoid buying compost in large plastic bags.  The kids had fun doing this too, planting up the seeds.  They love every opportunity to play with soil and get mucky.  And of course it is great to be able to teach them about the process and effort that goes into growing the food they eat. 

I had saved this white cardboard 'egg crate' box from the inside of a Lego advent calendar we had for Christmas for exactly this purpose.  I am glad I did, it seemed too much of a shame to just bin/recycle such a great piece of cardboard.  I also have this great little tool for making my own paper pots gifted gardener pot maker from newspaper.  They are a little fiddly and I think about 1 in 2 actually turn out.   But while all the plant pots (even the cardboard ones come wrapped in plastic), I thought it was worth giving it a go.  I have put them in the top of egg boxes to hold them together and allow a little more water to be absorbed.  They are now sitting in front of a window, I will just have to wait and see what happens.  I have to remember to water them... So fingers crossed!