Garden planning - seed buying

Posted by Rosie

Oh dear, this has been the week of so much NON gardening at Eco-Gites of Lenault.  Frost early on put paid to plans I had and now we have rain.  On the few days of fine weather in between I was just too busy either other things - think: sorting out dead modem, helping Simon rebuild the collapsed desk, grappling with pigs who had just run through le merde, wondering how on earth I could get said merde smell off my hands*, more pig moving (including making temporary pens and mending fences due to Coco's escaping tendencies - we foiled her though) and ferrying boys to and from sport.  All that took up pretty much all of the dry weather.

HOWEVER, all is not lost and whilst I may not have got my hands dirty (ignoring the merde that is), I have been dreaming and planning.  You see a gardener never really stops gardening and times of inclement weather are when plans are made and seeds are bought.  

I bought a lots of my seeds in the autumn when my local garden centre/animal supplies/agricultural supplies/homeware shop had a 15% off promotion.  Some seeds are however better bought in the UK.  These include parsnips, Runner beans, podding beans, pumpkins and squashes, spring onions, obscure Heritage tomato varieties and Japanese greens.  These I buy mail order and I have been drooling over the online catalogue this week trying to keep my order to a sensible amount!  I may just have failed on that count.  I have also just remembered that a friend gave me a French catalogue she uses and it is huge.  There are literally hundreds of pages of vegetable seeds including rare and Heritage ones.  This could get expensive ...

Oh and as a complete aside, this box caught my eye in the bargain basket at the garden centre when I popped in to buy some more mange-tout seeds.  I didn't buy it.

Did you manage to get out in the garden this week?  Maybe some of the people joining in with Annie's How Does Your garden Grow linky will have been successful and I am hoping Annie's own blog post will include some pictures from Kenya where she has been this week, as part of Team Honk and Comic Relief.

* As for smell of merde removal I can report back that any amount of soap, oodles of washing up, special odour removing soap a friend gave me and Vanish all failed miserably.  Rubbing lemon juice all over them worked a treat.