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Plants & pots & seeds

Posted by on Monday 4 July 2011 in growing | 5 comments

Thanks for all your batch cooking and what-to-grow-in-my-empty-spots suggestions! I’ll reply to the comments as soon as I can but I’m feeling very inspired by both! :)

I mentioned on the empty-spots-in-the-garden post that I was visiting my mum & dad on Saturday and my dad might have some spare plants for me – well, he certainly did. He gave me:

Six lavender plants – he was offering more (he’s gone a little lavender crazy this year) but I don’t have room for them. As it is, a couple of these will go to our neighbour who loves lavender.

Three (admittedly slightly pot-bound) chillis and eight (capsicums) pepper plants. These will need potting on immediately and I’m not convinced we’ll have quite a long enough season to really benefit from them – but I’ve got others of both so these will just be bonuses (and I’m going to try overwintering all my chillis this year too). They will, of course, have to stay in the greenhouse rather than filling up my currently empty containers/bed – and last week that would have worried me because I’m running low on decent sized pots … which I mentioned to my dad and lo & behold:

40+ decent sized pots. (Leaves in the photo for scale and not just because we’ve not swept the porch recently ;) ) He has hundreds stashed near his old greenhouses (from when he knew a landscape gardener and saved them from landfill) — I only took 40 this time but could have taken ten times that. I feel confident I might never need to buy a medium size plant pot again ;)

My mum also had a box of goodies for me – old jars, egg boxes and whatnot – and included in that were some seeds that they’d got free but wouldn’t use: packets of peas, coriander, tomatoes, land cress, rocket and all year round lettuce. I’m going to use a couple of my foot-square scrap wood planters for the rocket & land cress, and the rest can join my seed stash for use next year. (At last count, I’ve got about 18 packets of seeds free this year from one source or another – about half flowers, the rest veg – so hopefully next year will be a cheap year!)

So not only did we get to introduce Lily-dog to the sea (funny!), have pink-and-white ice creams and a visit to Broadhursts – oh, and see my mum & dad, my garden is a little fuller now too :)

What did you get up to this weekend? Did you get to enjoy the sun?

5 Comments

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  1. shaheen

    Parents eh – got to love them :)

  2. Karen M

    Shortbread with lavendar – a thing of beauty!!

    • louisa

      My old lavenders (which came from my dad last year) are only just getting big enough to give up their flowers/leaves for scenting things — next year will be a lavender shortbread/cupcake/soap scented summer! :)

  3. Linda

    Here in the South, I have only about 4 hours of real sun but it is absolutely gorgeous and a lovely break from the bitter cold and thick frost! (breaking the ice for the hens water ;) )
    Weekend was lovely for walking as no wind. Not much growing so it’s fun to read about all your Northern production, and funny to remember that stews are probably not your ‘batch cooking’ choice right now, lol.

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