Category Archives: domestic

Seedlings, day 31

All except the carrots. See, the carrots are outside now, in their own tub, growing up on their own, wearing unsuitable clothing and listening to their bands. I went out there to take photos but they just glared at me and muttered under their breaths about how embarrassing it was. I think they might have been smoking.

So yeah, no carrot pictures. Let’s look at the cute plants instead!

Cucumbers, winning the award for Leaf Shape I Was Least Expecting. Would you look at that! It’s the seedling equivalent of getting a Mohican.

Rocket, winning the It Turns Out That Wasn’t Damping Off After All Then trophy. (But it looked so like it! Weird. Anyway, well done that rocket.)

Sweet peppers, winning at being small but perfectly formed.

Onions, winning at interpretative dance.

Lettuce: Champion Cup, Most In Need Of Thinning Out (Lanarkshire), 2012.

The tomatoes that won my heart.

That orchid

Decorating my study, which is really just a tiny Ikea desk + bookshelf crunched into the corner of a bigger room.

I got this from the orchid fair at the Botanic Gardens, which was amazing (and beat the wedding fair hands down). Stall after stall of orchids, along with cacti and a beehive behind perspex to show all the honeybees crawling industriously around. (Well… crawling around, anyway. On an individual scale they always look a bit aimless. But then, their strength doesn’t really lie on an individual scale.)

Anyway, there were a lot of orchids to pick from, but I fell in love with the colours of this one. The brown of the buds against the dark stems and the pale pink flowers is just gorgeous, and it looks great next to my desk.

Seeds and seedlings

We don’t have a huge amount of space for growing things. (We don’t have a huge amount of space at all; it’s a fair-sized house for the two of us, really, but we’re still not exactly overburdened with room.) And since all the plants for my window-boxes and hanging baskets are currently living in the sunroom, we really don’t have a huge amount of space for growing even more things.

Still… I wanted to grow vegetables. I reallywanted to grow vegetables. I’ve always loved the idea of growing my own food, and even if my long-cherished dream of keeping chickens for eggs is still some way off yet, keeping carrots has got to be possible. Also, carrots cannot do any of the things that chickens did in my limited experience of chicken-sitting, including digging up flowers, pecking each other, haughtily dismissing the flirting efforts of teenage peacocks (this was hilarious, but made the peacocks get all grumpy and morose) and nearly giving me a heart attack by escaping into the woods for two hours. Carrots? Pfft. Easy.

At least they posed nicely for my photos to make up for it.

But anyway! Vegetables.

So I moved some plants around, and relocated the sweet peas to the living room (the sweet peas would probably be okay to go outside now, to be honest, but after last week’s 20-degree temperature drop and snowstorms, I’m still not that confident), and made space for six small seed-trays. Added to the sweet peppers seedlings, that makes seven in total: tomato, onion, cucumber, carrots, lettuce, and onion. The idea is to transfer them to pots out in the garden once they get big enough, but right now I’ll be happy just to see them grow at all.