Another Day Seed Sowing in the Greenhouse

Monday was mild again and we had times when the sun broke through the clouds followed by typical April showers. 

As the weather didn't seem to be able to make its mind up one way or the other I decided to get some more sowing done out of the showers in the greenhouse. I thought I might be a bit behind sowing seeds but checking out last season’s sowing dates that’s not the case and in general last year we had a good year on the plot. Any problems weren't down to sowing too late.

My main task of the day was to get our sweet peas sown. This year Sue’s gone for named varieties so they've all been carefully positioned and labelled  in their trays. Funny how the black text on the individual packets has completely disappeared in the photo. It’s a good job I wasn't relying on it for identification. Our sweet pea varieties are all listed here.

Each tray contains two varieties and there were nine varieties altogether so this shows half of the sowing with the seeds covered with vermiculite after each seed was pushed into the compost. 

All our seeds will need a little bit of warmth to get them to germinate successfully. It only takes a little bit of sunshine to warm the greenhouse but so far this month it’s been in very short supply. 

This chart shows how many hours of sunshine my weather station has recorded since July 2010. At the end of the first week of April it’s recorded a meagre 10.1 hours of sunshine only. So if there’s no improvement for the rest of the month we’d be looking at around 40 hours of sunshine which would be very low for April. My guess is that things can only improve.

Copyright: Original post from A Gardener's Weather Diary http://ossettweather.blogspot.co.uk/ author M Garrett