Sowing - at last!

You know how it is: every gardener I know is impatient to get on and sow some seeds, even when Spring is way over the horizon. I've been trying hard to resist the urge, but I have caved in. I just HAD to sow something - it's a craving impossible to ignore, you know... I have sowed two pots of Parsley.

There's not much to see, but I felt that the sowing of the first seeds of the year needed to be recorded.

Parsley takes ages to germinate at the best of times, (the seed pack says it can be as much as 28 days), so sowing these seeds now is actually justifiable. I'm going to bring them on indoors, on a windowsill, in the hope that by the time the weather begins to warm up they will be big enough for transplanting outside.

I have sowed two different types. One is a very dark green curly one called "Darki"

And the other is the flat-leaf one sometimes called "French" or "Continental" parsley. The seed pack calls it "French - plain-leaved".

In order to get the seeds going I soaked the compost in some hot water before sowing. I think this was a good decision because the bag of compost I used had been standing outside in the cold, where the temperature is currently hovering around 4 or 5 degrees, and the seeds would definitely not germinate in that sort of temperature! After leaving the pots to drain for a while I scattered about 15 - 20 seeds on the surface of the compost in each pot, and covered them with a thin layer of dry compost. If they all germinate I will thin them out later.

I have equipped each pot with its own mini-greenhouse to assist with maintaining humidity and protecting from draughts. I used some plastic freezer bags for this. The pots are now standing in saucers on the Dining-Room windowsill, directly above a central heating radiator.

So now it's back to the Waiting Game again.