Spring Seed Sowing Week 2
Hello friends,
It was a busy week seed sowing for Spring. I like to sow a mix of vegetable, herb, and flower seeds each week, so no individual job is too big at any one time.
Vegetable Seed Sowing this week:
- Pearl Drop Onions (for pickling)
- Italian Long Keeper Onions
- Pukekohe Long Keeper Onions
- Long White Spring Onions
- Santana Spinach
- Space Saver F1 Cabbage
- Summer Sprouting Purple Broccoli
- Coastline Lettuce
- Drunken Woman Fringed Lettuce
- Rocket
Herb Seed Sowing this week:
- Gigante Italian Parsley
- Celery for Cutting
- Soapwort
Flower Seed Sowing this week:
- Alyssum Painters Palette
- Alyssum Carpet of Snow
- Pansy Imperial Antique Shads
- Pansy Purple Lace
- Viola Clear Colour Mix
- Viola Frizzle Swizzle
- Viola Imperial Antique Shades
- Calendula Dwarf Colours Mixed
- Calendula Nova (herbal variety)
- Snapdragon Potomac Lavender
- Statice Apricot
- Night Scented Stock
- Spring Sparkle Stock
- Allium Purple Sensation
- Allium Showy Persian Onion
I have super easy way of seed sowing annual flowers, a cheat way really. I have a lot of self seeded annual plants in my flower garden beds, and I keep an eye out in late winter to see when plants like calendula, pansies, and alyssum start germinating. Once I see that the ground is warm enough for that to happen, it's time to sow annual seeds.
I gather all my annual seeds, and start opening all the packets. Here is where the lazy part is, I dump all the seeds into one container. And once all the seeds are mixed in all together I go out into the garden and start sprinkling seeds around where I want my annual plants to grow.
Within a couple of weeks all the annual seeds start germinating, and since I know what the seedlings all look like, I know not to weed them out of the ground. It may be lazy, but it saves me heaps of time in not having to sow each seed out by hand. I also like the wild, non structured feel of where the plants grow, as compared to all my other plants in the garden.
I have also just popped all my poppy seeds into the fridge to vernalise for two weeks. After that I will sow those seeds in a similar manner. I already have poppy plants that have self seeded into the garden as well, but I wanted to add even more coloured varieties this year.
How is your seed sowing going? With sunrise coming at least a minute earlier every single day, I can just feel the coming of Spring deep within my bones. The sky is no longer dark when I wake up in the morning, and I look forward to seeing the sun pop over the hills as I make breakfast each morning.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon.
Growing Our Own Wheat
Hello friends,
I'm a curious person at heart, I love growing new things in the garden, and especially when they're niche plants or crops. Every year I'm always trying a new variety of tomato or basil to see if I can get a crop that works well in our local conditions, and I've also grown linen plants so I can get flax fibre for spinning (but that's a whole other story)...
Back during the great bread flour shortage of 2020 during New Zealand's first Covid 19 lock down, I joked to hubby that we might have to start growing our own wheat and then processing it into flour if we wanted to continue baking our own bread at home. I was only joking of course at the time, but ever since then the idea has been at the back of my mind. Could I possibly successfully grow my own wheat, process it, and then make it into bread?
During the winter months of last year (2022), I finally decided that now was the time to try growing wheat in my vege garden. There's an unspoken rule about wheat locally—you can't grow it successfully in Otago, and especially down in Dunedin. You grow wheat in Canterbury, and oats in Otago (now that gives me another idea...). I chatted with my friends online, and they were doubtful it would work, it's too cold and not sunny enough, but that didn't deter me. Hubby and I live in Mosgiel, which is an inland suburb of Dunedin, and we get long, hot summers compared to suburbs much closer to the sea. I successfully grow limes, lemons, and mandarins outside during the summer, and wheat isn't as fussy as to grow as them.
My first task was researching where I could find wheat seed. I found two small seed merchants in New Zealand who sell it, Kings Seeds and Kōanga Institute. The Kings Seeds wheat was sold in packets for growing wheatgrass, and came in a handy 1 kg packet, so I went with that since I was already buying other seeds from them in my spring seed order.
My next task was figuring out when to sow the seed, and I found this wonderful blog post by Epic Gardening detailing everything I needed to know about growing wheat. My plan was to sow a 1 m x 2 m section of vege garden bed in early October, at 25 plants per square foot, as our last frost is usually in late September. That would give the wheat plenty of time to form ripe wheat berries over summer before autumn arrived, as it takes 120 days from seed sowing to harvest. But unfortunately that plan was delayed by two weeks after we got an 8 cm snowfall in early October, followed by a week of frosts.
So the week before Labour Weekend I prepared the soil to a nice and fine tilth, and then sowed my seeds. I diligently placed bird netting on a frame, watered the seeds in, and waited impatiently for them to sprout. What I didn't count on though, was Luna, our neighbor's cat. She had decided that the netting and fame made a nice hammock, and it would be great to sleep on.
While climbing onto, and sleeping on the bird netting she created gaps, and that's how the birds got in. Without me knowing, within half a day, sparrows had eaten most of the wheat seeds I sowed. After much grumping, and completely redesigning the frame and bird netting, I completely bird and cat proofed the second sowing of wheat seed. And this time it worked.
After about a week, the wheat seeds germinated. It was easy to tell the wheat from any weeds, as wheat is a grass plant. The plants grew fast and strong with sunshine and spring rain, and by the time it got to Christmas, the plants themselves were already 80 cm tall, and they'd already set seed heads.
Our past summer was the hottest and driest in years, and I think that helped the wheat ripen quite quickly. The bird netting went back on as the wheat began to turn golden,after I noticed that the sparrows had begun to hang around the wheat again. The tricky part was knowing when to harvest, and I used the Epic Gardening guide to figure out when I was time to cut the stems.
I used a combination of looking at the angle of the heavy seed heads, the hardness of the individual wheat berries when pressed between two fingernails, and also the golden colour of the seed heads to know when it was time to harvest. The wheat wasn't uniformly ready all at the same time, so I selectively cut them on hot summer days in late January, and bundled them up for drying.
The wheat bundles had to dry in the sun for a week before threshing, but I also needed to keep the sparrows away from the drying grain. After much pondering on how to do this step, I decided on laying out the wheat bundles on the gravel floor of the glasshouse during the day. Every morning I would lay the out the wheat bundles on the glasshouse floor, and then place a mesh screen over the glasshouse door, so there would be good airflow.
After a week of drying the bundles were bone dry, and some wheat berries had already began popping out of the seed heads. The next step is threshing, followed by winnowing, and I'll share these processes with you in a future blog post.
But what I can conclude from this whole process, is that wheat is indeed an easy to grow crop. It doesn't require any specialised tools, and is well within the abilities of a home gardener. I've also shown that is possible to grow wheat in Otago, and Dunedin, if you live in a warm, sunny suburb away from the sea. I will happily grow wheat again in my garden in the future.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon.
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