I haven’t written about my garden in a while as not much has been happening apart from the fact that my plants are growing. Today, I have been doing some seed sowing and re-potting of some of my exiting plants.

The seeds that I have sown include the following:

• Broad beans (Vicia faba)-the cultivars ‘Crimson Flowered’ and ‘Aprovecho’
• Plenty more peas (Pisum sativum ‘Greenfeast’)
• Onions-Allium cepa, ‘Cream Gold’, ‘Barletta’ and ‘Red Marksman’
• Broccoli-Brassica oleacea ‘Broccoli Green Sprouting’
• Helichrysum bracteatum ‘Pink’, ‘Copper Red’, ‘Salmon Rose’ and ‘Silvery Rose’
• Papaver rhoeas ‘Shirley Poppy Mix’ and ‘Flanders Field’
• Papaver commutatum ‘Poppy Ladybird’

My broccoli and onion seeds have been sown into small coir pots instead of plastic. I am trying these as I want to use less plastic in my garden where I can. Also, once the broccoli and onion seedlings are big enough to pot on into larger pots, I won’t have to disturb their roots as the whole thing gets put into new pottting mix in a larger pot, allowing the plant in question to grow better due as they are not suffering from transplant shock. The coir pot should eventually rot down. I haven’t used them before, so it is a bit of an experiment on my part.

To re-pot my mandarin and avocado trees into the same pot, I took each one out of the pot they are in and trimmed an 2.5cm (1 inch) from the outside of the root ball, to encourage new root growth. I then put some new potting mix into the bottom of the pots before putting the root balls back into the pots. The gap between the pot sides and the root ball was then filled with potting mix too. A good water to finish and all three plants will be happy until this time next year.

The peas I planted first have plenty of pods on them now and it wont be long before we can harvest the pods. My sweet peas and broad beans look like they are forming flower buds, which will add colour to my rather pale, bland patio area (and also something to eat eventually too).

In terms of weather recently, we have had a really warm few weeks considering it is winter. Spring seems to be coming a little earlier this year. It has been nice though as we have had plenty of sunshine this week, although today (Sunday, 13th August) it is cloudy and we are expecting some rain later on today.