Getting into Gardening – Planting the Seeds
Read Part 1 of this series – Garden Preparation.
Regardless of whether you plan to grow plants in the ground or in large pots and hanging baskets (or both!), you need some plants to get started with. These days the garden centres can do the hard work for you and in April/May time you’ll find ready grown tomato plants, chilli plants, peppers, and more, at affordable prices. However, where’s the fun in that? Well, use it as a back up at least! Most salad plants such as lettuce, radish and spring onions, can be started from seed between March and August/September, depending on how long the good weather lasts. Tomato, chilli and pepper seeds should be planted in March/April time, kept covered and ideally in a warm environment such as a greenhouse or kitchen windowsill.
Starting with Seeds
So what do you need to get started? Work out what you want to grow first, especially if you’re short on space in the garden. Go to the local garden centre and have a look in the seeds section for the plants you want to grow. All seed packets will have information about sowing and reaping on the back of them so there’s no guessing needed. Follow the instructions and you should be fine. You’ll also need some seed trays of some sort, seed compost (John Innes No. 1 can be found in virtually all UK garden centres) and a sheltered area to store your seed trays – we have a 3 tier portable mini greenhouse which costs around £17. Substitutions for seed trays include egg trays. The idea with seed trays is that you just use the seed compost in it, place a few seeds (I usually do 2 or 3) per section, cover them over and just keep them watered. Once the seedlings start to appear you can thin them down to one per section. However I usually allow them to all grow (if you can try and space the seeds out a little within the little section then they’ll have a bit more space each).
Re-potting Seedlings
Once your seedlings appear strong and established (eg. they’re about 5cm high on lettuce and radish, perhaps a bit taller for spring onions) then you can take them out of the seed tray and either put them into the ground, if the cold weather has passed, or into a bigger pot with John Innes No. 2 soil based compost mixed with some soil. I personally have hanging basket and potting compost, also John Innes which I mix with top soil as I don’t have any soil available to me in the garden (besides digging up the grass and taking some out from under that!). For repotting you need to determine the size of pot or pots that you’ll need to use depending on how long the plant will be in the pot. For plants that will eventually go into the ground then a small pot should be fine to allow the roots to expand more, providing a stronger plant ready for the garden. However, for plants that you’re intending to keep in the pots for their lifetime then I’d start with a medium to large pot for a couple of weeks until it’s grown a bit stronger, and then move on to a larger container.
Growing in Pots
If you’re not intending to plant anything in the ground then you need to look at using pots and grow-bags. Most salad plants that you continually replace – lettuce, radish, spring onion, rocket etc., will not grow massive roots and so won’t need a great depth of space. You can get about 10cm deep long window type boxes which are about a metre long. These will work quite well for these plants, as will medium sized flower pots. You could also get a few large pots to go out on the patio and just fill them up with standard soil in the bottom, leaving the top 5-10 cm to be the mix of potting compost and soil. If you don’t have pots then look at what else you have. I’ve got empty 5l plastic water bottles at home and will be cutting a few of these up, taking the top off, adding a few holes in the bottom of them and voila, cheap large tubs for growing plants 
If ground space is lacking you can also use hanging baskets to grow plants in. Strawberries work quite well in baskets, keeping the strawberries away from woodlice and slugs that have a habit of eating them, and can look colourful hanging down from the basket, ripening in the glorious sun. Treat hanging baskets in the same way as growing in pots.
Growing in the Ground
If you’re planting out in the garden then make sure that your plants will get the sunlight they need, keep the ground watered (do this at night to allow the water to seep deeper into the ground), if there’s a risk of cold weather or even frost then you’ll need to keep your plants covered. You can make a mini polytunnel with some corrugated plastic curved over the plants (use some canes or sticks to hold the plastic curved), and cover up the ends with some flat plastic. This will create a mini greenhouse over the plants which is great when the sun isn’t so warm. Also if the sun gets too hot (unlikely in the UK but it can happen!) then you may need to cover your plants with some fleece or covering that blocks out the hot midday sun. Also, be careful to not have water droplets on your lettuce leaves if the sun is out, else the leaves could burn.
- March 26th '08
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