It's as near to gardening as we get at the moment!

Posting on the blog is as near to gardening as we can manage at the moment. I have even managed to give the website a 'spring clean'.

Despite the poor weather seed orders are starting to arrive.

Our order from Plants of Distinction arrived yesterday. We have ordered seeds that are less commonly available from them. This year we ordered:

Beetroot - Sunset Mixed which produces red, yellow, white and bi-coloured roots

Cauliflower - Kaleidoscope Mixed which produces green, purple and orange heads

Tuscany and Provence Baby Salad Leaves

Melon - Noir des Carmes - which is supposedly one of the easiest melons to grow. I hope this is true as we haven't had a lot of success with melons.

Peppers - Jimmy Nardello's & Tequila Sunrise both are carrot shaped sweet peppers. Jimmy is reported to be the best sweet pepper I will ever taste and Tequila is a golden orange colour.

Squash - Potimarron & Crown Prince - we know Crown Prince is a good choice having grown it for a couple of years now but Potimarron is new to us

Tomato - Amish Gold which is said to produce huge solid yellow tomatoes.

We have also ordered a few flowers to give some extra colour and attract the beneficial insects as well as provide cut flowers.

Cosmos - Versailles Palace - which is great for cutting. We always have a patch of cosmos. It usually self seeds and produces some interesting colours but I guess this may not happen this year.

Papaver - Ladybird & Cherry Glow, - we already have some poppies that come up every year around the plot even though we haven't actually planted any before. We have quite a variety of colour as they must cross pollinate. (Shown in photo) If they come up in an inconvenient spot they are removed but otherwise they are left to do their thing. Maybe we will have even more cross pollination when we add these varieties.

We were also sent a couple of complementary packets of seed:

Sicilian Rocket Salad Mixed - which contain seven varieties of rocket - I didn't know there were seven varieties

Achillea - Flowerburst - we have several achillea on the plot again for cut flowers and to attract the insects and they are really good 'doers' as well as being really attractive so this variety will add to our colour palette and some may even end up in the garden.

Each year we carefully choose our seeds bearing in mind what we have room for and every year we end up with extra freebies either from seed companies or from magazines. Most freebies are welcome but the couple of packs of chilli seeds that have come via magazines will be given away. After last year's chilli experience we won't be growing any this year! We also got a couple of varieties of Sweet Pepper - California Wonder & Romano Mixed. Last year everyone was giving away tomato seeds, this year it looks as if peppers are flavour of 2010