Sunday, February 22, 2009

Burning Man Festival comes to Allotment 81

Well, almost. I do want to go to the Burning Man Festival but fear I may be too old and terminally uncool. There's also the small matter of it being in Nevada.

For the moment I'll content myself with burning piles of rubbish and dig-dig-digging it. Look how much bindweed I got out of section 3 this morning.

I've also sown my Sweet Pea seeds. The RHS advice says to nick the hard seed coat opposite the growing point, to help the seed hydrate. Good advice of course, but has anyone with normal size fingers ever tried doing it? Ye Gods. I concluded that there was a fair old risk of taking a finger end off, and making no inroads on the seed coat at all. They'll have to hydrate without any help from me.

5 comments:

Nutty Gnome said...

I think I'll trust to luck with me sweet peas, rather than knifing them to death before I plant 'em!

The Mulch said...

You can use sandpaper. It works a treat.

The Gnome said...

And if you do cut a finger tip off, just pop it into a small pot of John Pinky number one compost and in 6 months you will have a new set of fingers waving at you from your sweet pea patch.

Bob said...

I got a couple of barrow loads of bindweed out last week. I think that stuff is harder to get rid of then Japanese Knotweed. I can imagine how trying to chip a bit off a sweet pea seed can be a fiddle. I think I would probably lose more due to them pinging off the potting shed walls than to non germination. I just put them in the compost and they seem to always come up okay. I find that mice are the worse problem with sweet pea. Bob

HappyMouffetard said...

UKBob is right - I've had sweetpea and canna seeds ricocheting all over the greenhouse before now. I've also tried sandpaper. In the end, I just let them get on with it without my intervention!