The gardening season has began again and I hope this year we have even more success. I have decided to wait till October this year as it's very hot this year and from last years' experiences I know it would be too much trouble with most plant to start earlier. I was also on a vacation and came mid September and the past couple of weeks were spent on adaption and preparations.
I have finally organized my seed collection (well still more work to do, but it's not a mess it used to be). I used Ikea storage boxes and it worked out great.
I have read a few book and learned a lot of new things. I am looking into converting my garden into a permaculture garden and I need to learn even more. I hope to talk about what I learned and what I intend to do, in the blog posts this year Inshallah.
I have marked the beginning of the season by starting cabbages, broccoli, cauliflowers and Brussels sprouts yesterday. I don't usually start seedlings indoors, and neither am I a fan of seed starting to begin with, but I feel I need to learn to do this. These brassicas particularly, take a long time to grow and they never reach maturity in my garden. They don't like heat and struggle to take off in the beginning. By the time they're growing it gets too hot and they never reach harvesting stage. So the only option I see at the moment is starting them indoors and planting them out once it's cool enough. I know I should have started them a bit earlier but I hope I still have the time for them to grow.
This time around, I added fertilizer to the potting mix. They say you don't need to add fertilizer when starting seeds but my experience tells me otherwise. The potting mix we use doesn't have much nutrients, and adding fertilizer later, when the seedlings start growing, is troublesome for such small pots. By the time the seedlings are growing the fertilizer becomes available so it's a win win situation. I used Sustane, one of the only organic certified fertilizers I found here. I used the recommended dosage for container planting and mixed it into my potting mix. For the mix I used the following formula:
1 part compost (I used a bit of mine and a bit from Shalimar)
1 part sweet sand
1 part coco peat
1 part perlite
I settled for this because it gives the texture that I feel is good. Feel free to play with ratios, and let us know what you think.
I hope to start others this week. If you have any questions or comments do write below.
Happy Gardening
Yana