So I started sowing my seeds super early! I'm a complete novice and dived straight in before properly researching dates and such. The results have been fast germination and quick growing seedlings, which I was not expecting and a little unprepared for.

The runner beans are getting rather tall, around 1ft most of them and they still cannot go outside until the middle of April and even then it's a bit risky if there is any sudden sharp frost. I'm hoping since we have had a very mild winter here in London that by mid April it will be nice and warm and the runner beans will flourish. In the mean time I have selected 4 and potted them up a size which hopefully will be adequate until they go into their final positions.

The tomato & chilli plants have now grown their true leaves, and I have now potted up 6 of each into individual 3" pots where they will remain for another good few weeks, although this could be shorter depending on how vigorously they grow.

Potting them up however was a bit of a nightmare! I used Jiffy plugs, which are a great idea but the instructions say to plant up to 3 seeds! Well unless you thin them out early and leave just one seedling it becomes very difficult to pot on. I lost a few seedlings in the process as some of the roots broke. So next time I will plant 2 seeds and thin them out nice and early.

I also finally got around to thinning out the carrot seedlings, unfortunately I had to transfer them into a much deeper pot as the trough the carrot seeds came with was only 5" deep. Their recommended in at least 8-10" deep. Carrots do not really like to be disturbed, however they seem to be doing ok.

One of the longest seeds to germinate were the mixed peppers, my last blog post showed the teeniest lonesome pepper seedling. Since then I have had 9 germinate and all are starting to develop their first true leaves. I will be leaving them to grow in the troughs to a decent size before thinning them down to 4 and then finally only selecting 2 to pot into final containers (one per 35cm pot).

I have decided only to grow 2 of each plants and I am hoping this will be both manageable and provide sufficient quantities of fresh fruit and veg. I have lots of things I would love to grow but simply not the space! Have you thought about growing your own this year? or have you already got seeds well underway?