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Today’s gardening adventures started when I discovered a link to a story about tweeting plants. Some clever people have devised a way for a plant to say when it’s thirsty. It tweets you. The idea of tweeting plants is edging worringly close to Triffids for my liking (OK, so I’m a touch paranoid), but I was still very impressed by the combination of technology and gardening. If you’re any good at electronic engineering, I’d love to see one in action.
Then, it was time for Hove Food and Drink Festival, sampling chutneys, cider, chilli sauce, honey, jams and cheese from the surrounding area (plus alcoholic ginger beer, which isn’t local but is tasty) and meeting interesting people. I’ll be posting about both Harvest and Foodshare at a later date but both are great initiatives that are well worth looking into if you’re in the Brighton and Hove area. I resisted the urge to buy endless herbs for the garden (soapwort, for making my own soap, has a strange lure. I’ve made soap before but it’s a lot of effort, though you do get enough soap to last for years, and making the aromatherapy oil blend is fun) and instead headed back to the garden (stopping off at a farm en-route to help my man’s mum feed their lambs – my first time, and something I definitely want to repeat because lambs are utterly adorable. Must not get too attached to them or otherwise I’ll end up having to turn vegetarian.)
Since my last post about peas, they’ve shot up, so I had to transplant them from seedling trays into bigger pots (in this case, yoghurt pots). However, they needed staking as they were beginning to droop over the edge of the tray. This was problematic as the pots aren’t big enough to support bamboos but the peas were sulking without support. The problem was solved with wicker lawn edging from Poundland. The edging is only held in loosely with wire so you effectively have about 300 short pea stakes all tied together for £1. That’s what you can see in the above pictures (along with the pea flowering – only a few weeks after being planted. That’s one of the reasons I love peas.)
The salad leaves, spinach, sorrel and rocket are at seedling stage now so I’ll be writing about them soon. But tomorrow, I’m planning on making some tea light holders from jam jars, and photographing the process so you’ve got a step-by-step guide: dig out some jam jars, wire, string, ribbon and anything else you fancy decorating your tea-light holders with if you fancy giving it a go too. Assuming I don’t end up spending the whole day cuddling lambs.
groweatgift 