Testing ... Testing ... 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... Testing..!

There are lots of things I love about twitter and have blogged previously about the advantages of a carefully worded comment in the twitter-sphere which has bought us free tickets, gifts, and lots and lots of free advice and info from fellow growers and urban farmers.  But it has to be said that one of my most favourite things about this electronic media is not the voyeuristic opportunities it offers when celebs wear their heart on their sleeve nor the immediate nature of its newsreel when a world-wide event occurs, it is the opportunity it gives us to maintain a distant contact with other likeminded souls. These contacts we will probably never stand on the same square metre of the planet with simultaneously, but we can observe their projects, plans and ideas and in turn see the outcomes and their thoughts on future developments, and they ours.  It is from just such an encounter that we are currently trialling a new style of veg growing.  In the past we have been garden sowers, setting seeds in drills into the soil in which they will mature.  We have used propagators, seed trays and pricking out techniques but almost exclusively for the production of bedding plants and cucumbers which never seem to take well directly in the soil.

However due to twitter chatter with a good guy growing micro veg in the midlands we are trialling sowing all our veg into seed trays, pricking them out or transplanting them in slices into growing planters and thinning them out from there to provide sufficient room for development.
The early signs are superb.  The germination rates on seeds sown in this way is massively improved on those directly into soil.  I suppose having 2 cats who love to dig and a resident urban fox that passes through most weeks was always going to give a negative return on drills set in the garden and even our attempts to use netting as a deterrent to all of these visitors to the veg beds only improved the return by about 25%.
We set a packet of beets, one of carrots and one of spring onions in seed trays and within 10 days transplanted 2 planters with beets spaced about 2" apart, 2 trays of spring onions about 1" spacing and a full tray packed with carrots which we will thin out in the coming weeks as they mature into baby plants.  It is our intention to harvest all of these as baby veg, so small sweet beets, likewise junior carrots and lovely thin crisp scallions to dress a salad or be chopped into noodle dishes and the like.



The planters have not cost us a penny as my pallet fetish continues to thrive and in fact be supported by more twitter friends who have offered us their unwanted bases which we in turn strip down to planks and give them a new lease of life as a planter lined with old compost bags poked with drainage holes.
We are now planning some free standing planter holders from our latest haul of free timber, just like the ones sold at garden centres for £100 a piece but ours will cost us nothing other than the time and effort.
So early signs of our test-beds (nice...did you see what i did there!!) is much better yield per packet of seeds, next step is to see how the final produce shapes up...
Watch this space in coming weeks for the results and yet again...

Thanks Twitter.