Spring sowing take 2

Today's post is mostly my own personal diary entry on what I've sown during this waxing moon phase. So if you're not really into gardening, stop reading now. I don't want to bore you.

This week marked the second big sowing phase for this spring, as my neighbour Antonio helpfully pointed out last week. You just walk around the village innocently, when you are approached by your neighbours, telling you what to sow and when.

Anyway, the weather forecast predicted the Scirocco wind to start up again the tail end of this week, so we were quite keen to get the sowing finished before then. The Scirocco brings warm and moist air our way, so ideal for freshly sown seeds (indeed during the night there has been some rain and it looks like more in the air).

So to start off with I needed to make some room in the cold frame. As usual I sowed out far too many lettuce seeds and they were growing fast. Now I can't stand simply thining them out and discarding the extras. So I started transplanting some. I counted 57 plants so far which have gone partially amongst the leeks and onions on terrace 6 and partially on an empty bed by the Rennet apple tree on Terrace 10 (the locations are mainly as a reminder to myself, so you can skip over those).

The other thing that was screaming to be transplanted were the lentils. They had started to hit the ceiling of the cold frame. There were some 17 plants which had already developed an amazing root system:



I'm not sure if they need any support, but I gave them a bit of bamboo each, just in case and interplanted them with a few more lettuces.

Now for the sowing. In the cold frame I sowed the following:

• 2 types of tomato kindly supplied to me by Beck of http://greenspain.blogspot.com/: kumato, a brown tomato, which matures from the inside out and can therefore be eaten when still green on the outside and Campari a slightly larger cherry tom. Incidentally, my cold frame proved so effective, that during one of the sunny days last week my main tomato variety, marmande, simply frizzled and burned. So I'm glad to have some backup.
• 2 types of cucumber: Verde China and Market More
• 3 types of squash, 1 summer and 2 winter: Now, apart from courgettes, I've never really grown squashes and have rarely even eaten them. The varieties I went for were a pattypan squash called sunburst (mostly because it looked pretty on the picture of the seed packet, although I have no idea what it's going to be like or even how to cook it), a kind of butternut squash called violina lunga and an actual Halloween type pumpkin called Big Max. What possesed me to go for the latter I have no idea. I don't even particularly like pumpkin ever since I was introduced to sweet pumkin pies one Halloween I had the misfortune to spend in America back in 1979. And this fellow is said to produce 45kg fruit if you let it. How on earth am I going to stagger up our terraces with a pumpkin that size and how are we going to manage to eat it all!?! Well to solve the space problem that comes with these ginormous plants I have been gathering old car tyres and the like to place in little niches to small to dig a whole bed. So I'll just fill them up some compost and let them get on with it out of the way of other veg, just competing with their surrounding olive trees.
• Another chilli calledPiccante a Mazzetti, an Italian varietal growing upright in little bunches.
• more basil. You can never have enough!
• another lettuce called Romana verde

Outside I've sown the following:

• dwarf nasturtium amongst my brassica (T9)
• wild rocket (rear bed T2)
• Leaf chicory Catalogna Gigante di Chioggia (rear bed T2)
• 2 types of chard: Coste verde a costa bianco and bionda a costa argentata (T10 rear)
• flat leafed parsley (T10 amongst chard and onions)
• Endive Romaesco (T10 front amongst lettuce)
• and finally sweet corn mixed from saved seeds (T 13).
  

Then disaster struck. Just as I was going to untangle our long hoses for the first time this year to give the sweetcorn a good watering, I discovered that they had suffered badly during the winter and snapped in various places. Now our water source is on terrace number 5 (counting from the top, where the road access is). What remains of our hoses reaches Terrace 10 at a stretch, and the thirsty sweetcorn is on terrace 13. So yours truly had to run up and down the terraces (have I mentioned how steep they are?) with a watering can. So as a matter of priority, we need to invest in some new hoses, before the summer starts properly.

So for those who have read this far and haven't fallen asleep yet, here a pretty pic of some coltsfoot. Makes a good cure for coughs apparently. I'd gather some if ever I'd egt a cough.

Window of Opportunity

I was starting to get really itchy feet. Many a fellow gardening blogger had started spring sowing a couple of weeks ago whilst I was stuck on the wrong moon phase wondering if I was the only one following silly superstitions. It's not so much that I'm convinced this works, I just don't like showing a 'brutta figura' in front of my Italian neighbours. If they see you sowing tomatoes or the like during the waning moon period, they just tut and shake their heads at your utter foolishness. Only stupid foreigners evidently don't know about the cycles of nature.

The weather wasn't playing it's part either. According to local lore, today is the very day, half way between new moon and full moon, to start your spring sowing. And guess what: after days of miserable weather and lashings of rain, today the clouds parted and perfect conditions for sowing presented themselves! What's more, after a fantastic day of balmy sunshine, we were barely back indoors again, the rain returned giving everything a nice watering and more rain is forecast for the rest of the week.

On cue the almond tree opened it's first flowers too.

As I don't have a heated green house (not even a heated house for that matter), and the space I had created in front of an upstairs window for putting seed trays has been taken up by cats, who would cause chaos amongst my delicate seedlings, I have decided to sow straight into my newly built cold frame. More sensitive plants I sowed in trays covered with a plastic lid within the cold frame to give it a double glazing effect so to speak.

Incidentally, I had left a small gap during the construction of the cold frame, which I was going to block off anyway to avoid a draft. Today I had discovered that the gap was about cat-sized as a cat obviously enjoyed the nice warmth under cover.



Here is what we sowed today:

Outside:

• dwarf beans slenderette. I haven't tried these before, but according to the package they can be sown earlier (i.e. from Feb. onwards), so I shall stagger sowing.
• pea 'progress No.9'. I don't usually do well with peas. The autumn sown ones are struggling and in summer they don't like the sun beating down on them either. Maybe they'll do better this time. This variety sounds like a song from the Beatles' White Album!
  
• lettuce 'salad bowl'. A vigorous, easy and quick growing variety.
• Rocket. It normally sows itself out quicker than we can eat it, but this winter we suddenly found ourselves without any. Don't know how that happened.

In the cold frame:

• Tomato 'Marmande'. This one makes the bulk of my production every year, a large, fleshy and productive variety.
• Tomato 'Gigante seedless'. I don't know what posessed me to buy a seedless variety, it won't sow itself out in my compost. I must have just read GIGANTE and thought that sounds good. I didn't bother with sowing any other varieties as some cherry toms, salad toms and plum toms seem to usually spring up spontaneously anyway and I always run out of space to plant them all.
• Sweet pepper 'Feher'. This is a small pointy yellow variety ripening early and giving good crops for a long time.
• Pepper 'Quadrato d'Asti'. Large red peppers, very sweet
• Cayenne chillies.
• Chilli 'spicy cherry'. Great for stuffing with tuna or anchovies and preserving under oil.
• Aubergine 'halflange violette'. Obviously a Dutch cultivar meaning half long purple. Produced well last year
• Kohlrabi 'Delikatess Blue'. They were slightly old seeds, hope they'll come.
• Gherkin 'Vert Petit de Paris'. I love pickled gherkins. Last year I sowed some direct in the ground with only limited success, so I thought I'll start it off in the cold frame this year.
• 3 types of lettuce: 'meraviglia di 4 stagione', a reddish open head, 'gentilina', green frizzy lettuce and 'brasiliana', an iceberg variety.

Finally I decided to experiment with a few things. I love lentils and they are part of the Italian cuisine, but for some reason I have never seen lentil seeds for sale anywhere. A bit of research on the net revealed that they seem quite easy to grow and can even cope with some frost. So I just took a few brown lentils out of an ordinary packet of dried lentils and sowed them. Let's see what happens, eh?

Secondly I gathered some angelica seeds from the wild last year. I thought I'll try and grow some on one of my lower terraces where I can't do much else anyway in honour of my friend Angelika (Engelwurz) mentioned in the previous post.

Thirdly I was going to write something in the next part of wild food of the month about the judas tree. Both flowers and 'beans' of this apparently pretty tree are edible. Trouble is I haven't tried any myself yet and also I'm not sure I could identify one. In Arcola, near our land there are some pretty pink flowering trees which I thought might be it. So I picked a couple of pods with a view of sowing some out and making a positive id. It appears it's not a judas tree.

This is what the seeds and pods look like.


Like a judas tree they have an abundance of pink flowers in spring, but these specimen are trained in a pergola in a public park rather than growing upright. So I'm not sure what I've got there, anyone any ideas? I should maybe take a photo when it is in flower. I sowed a few of them anyway, it's a pretty plant.