Is there any better way to spend a snowy Saturday morning than sorting out your seed packets?!

I spent a very satisfying hour this weekend disposing of the old packets, rediscovering ones which I had bought some time ago (I bought dozens out of season in Lidl for 15p each!!) and then planning my sowing/planting calendar for the next few months.  Having also cleaned out my utility room in the past few days, which also serves as my greenhouse, I am now ALL SET to start growing!

I am trying to keep it simple this year, and have plans to repeat my attempts to grow potatoes, carrots, onions and peas.  I’m also going to add some lettuce and rocket – mainly because these were some of the bargain 15p packets so if they don’t grow I won’t have lost anything!  I think these will be good to try under cover and I have a cloche which I bought in Aldi last year marked down at the end of the growing season (there’s a definite theme developing here…!) so I fancy trying it with the salad veg and maybe a few carrots.  Sowing some of these under cover also means I can start growing early, which is good because I’m itching to get started.

First things first, though, and I need some seed potatoes so I can start chitting them.  I hope to get my hands on some by the end of the week.  I’m also going to sow the first of my sweet pea seeds.  These are a must for me in the garden – they are so colourful, they flower abundantly and smell gorgeous.  I’m going to plant loads, everywhere!

These pics display the best of the vegetable beds for 2015 – a poor show I’m afraid and I’m not sure if that’s more to do with my lack of expertise, the quality of the soil or the fact that this summer’s weather was frankly pretty rubbish.  Nearby fellow gardeners with a great deal more experience than I have reported that many of their own vegetable crops were also unusually bad so I’m hopeful that with a year’s worth of knowledge under my belt and a much sunnier, warmer spring/summer (fingers crossed) that 2016 will see a lot more growing in these veg beds and that they’ll look a great deal more green and fulsome.

It’s now January so I’m beginning to make a few plans about what will go in this year – for a start I think I will try to grow some more fruit.  Some Tayberry bushes left by the previous owner, which I thought I had removed (I didn’t know what they were at the time), seem to be growing back so I’m going to encourage them to return!  I’d like to have some more raspberries and on the veg front I will probably try again for some potatoes and maybe carrots.  I’m going to be less ambitious and plant more of a smaller number of vegetables, rather than a wide variety.  And I’m hoping I can pull some rhubarb this year – the plants grew ok but never looked particularly ripe and ready…

Another thing I would also like to repeat is planting a bed of flowers for cutting – this did well, although it looked very unruly a lot of the time!  But my daughters enjoyed picking the flowers and making up little bouquets and vases with different stems and I really loved seeing how quickly they grew, even if many of the flowers did take a long time to bloom (like I said, it was a cool summer!).

The snapdragons did quite well and the sweet peas were marvellous – these will definitely be back in 2016 I think.