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Lessons from our garden so far

Posted by on Friday 16 July 2010 in growing | 0 comments

As we only moved into our house last autumn, our first growing season has been one of experimentation – see what grows here, what doesn’t, and what else we have to contend with.

Here’s some of the lessons I’ve learned so far:

Butternut squashes take longer to germinate that most other things. I planted six seeds and a few weeks later, when everything else was well underway, I had just one sprout poking through the soil. Oh, I thought, that’s a really poor germination rate. Damn you, eBay seeds!. Then I planted another 40 (…) seeds with the hope of getting half a dozen plants. And a couple of days later, the original other five seeds sprouted. And then about 30 of the second sowing. I have a lot of squash plants this year.

(Ditto, to a slightly lesser extent, courgette plants. I had seven in my original planting then got some free seeds from BBC’s Dig In project and planted them too. After giving some away and losing some to one thing or another, I think we’ve currently got about 14 plants fruiting or about to fruit. Unsurprisingly, the self-germinating ones have been a lot more productive so far.)

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