Our First Homegrown Spinach Salad

We have eaten our first significant batch of Spinach and the plants look like they'll provide us with a lot more.

With a few leaves of our Basil and some Tomatoes (shop-bought), seasoning and Olive Oil - delicious, fresh and crisp.

And tomorrow we'll be having more of those tasty Pea Shoots.

Spinach Looking More Like the Real Thing

We last posted a picture of our young Spinach nearly a month ago on St Patrick's Day. Then each seedling just had the 2 thin grass-like leaves (called Cotyledon fyi) which you often find in bags of Spinach and feel a bit cheated. 

Now the proper round leaves are out and growing noticeably bigger each day. They're tasty too, we've eaten a few as they tend to damage easily.

Crop Rotation System

We squeeze as many plant pots onto the windowsill as possible. They all have to have their fair share of the sunlight so we spend some time each day rotating plants between different parts of the desktop and window.

As mentioned earlier, the desk is in front of a large West-facing window with plenty of light but only some direct sunlight in late afternoon and evening. Some plants are happy out of direct sunlight but most really seem to benefit from a few hours of sunbathing whenever possible.

We've had to stick to pots that fit between the window and the secondary glazing. At the top of this picture you can see the Spinach, next is 1 Pea plant then a few Tomato plants which are now looking really strong.

Desktop Garden One Month Review

After nearly a month and over 20 blog posts since we started the Desktop Garden it may be worth a quick review of how it's going.

You can see that the desk is quite full, the Tomatoes and Pak Choi are looking quite strong on the windowsill though we sometimes bring them in if it's a very cold night.

We have added a wire shelf to raise up the plants at the back of the desk to get them out of the shade a bit more.

The Mint and Rosemary are thriving and regrow whenever we snip off a few leaves for the kitchen but the Thyme was not at all happy, not sure why, some plants just don't like being indoors. We're going to try growing some Thyme from seed. Only 1 of the Pea seeds has sprouted, that is going well but we fear that may be the only one from the pack to germinate.

The Peppers, Spinach and Japanese Basil are looking good too. The Rocket Salad seedlings are are looking quite weak but most have new leaves appearing from the centre. We're thinking that it may better to sow some seeds straight into the big pots or troughs and leave them rather than starting in modules and potting up. As we're not going to plant outside it may be better to avoid any unnecessary disturbance. 

One unforeseen problem we have discovered is that we can't go away! We have to check, water, talk to and move plants every day. We'll have to appoint some trustworthy green-fingered friend to look after things when we go on holiday.

It is also difficult keeping the room clean and tidy - compost and water gets everywhere. Need to be organised and disciplined - we are of course :)

Its been fun so far and we've already learnt a lot. We're happy with how it looks and have already been blessed with some lovely flowers and edible herbs. It's sad when things fail but but it's great to wake up in the morning to check for new arrivals pushing their little heads through the soil.

Green Spinach for St Patrick's Day

A quick mobile phone photograph of our young Spinach on St Patrick's night. 

They're looking suitably very green and seem to be waving to the revellers outside the Pub down the road.

Super Spinach Seedlings

These Spinach seedlings are mighty! Hope they don't burn themselves out too quickly.

We've planted them up into one long trough only about 10cms apart. Better sow some more seeds soon as I reckon these will be eaten up in no time at all.

The room was colder last night as outdoor temperatures dropped, maybe should have invested in more covers for the seed trays.

Indoor Snowflakes!

Or A snowflake to be precise. It's not all herbs and veg in our Desktop Garden, there's a few flowers too. I've already mentioned the Tulips, the first of which are already starting to fade.

Here we have a small Bacopa Snowflake plant, it's often used to trail from hanging baskets and other containers so it should look nice trailing from this brightly coloured watering-can-style pot.

Going to pot up the Spinach later, they're looking quite vigorous.

Poorly Parsley

One of the hardest things in gardening is accepting the occasional (well, we hope it's only occasional) failure. Especially when it's due to one's own stupidity!

We managed to salvage a few bits of the parsley but the rest withered away in a very short time.

First of all I didn't pay proper attention, I thought this one plant that we bought was the standard flat leaf parsley but it was actually French Parsley a.k.a Chervil. Then I thought it looked like it would easily divide up into 4 smaller plants as long as I was careful to keep plenty of root on each. This has worked fine for many plants for me in the past but not this time. They obviously didn't like to be ripped apart!

Ah well, we learn from our mistakes - read the labels and instructions more carefully in future.

On a brighter note - the Spinach seeds are just starting to push their little heads through the soil.

First Tray of Rocket Seedlings

So here is a tray of 14 little Rocket plants that I've just 'pricked out'. Hope they all prosper, I've put the pots onto a tray of fine gravel to avoid waterlogging and increase humidity.

It was great to see that the Tomato seeds have just sprouted early this morning - too small to show in a picture yet.

I re-used the seed trays from the Rocket to plant a few Spinach seeds, they're quite big and easy to manage so I could easily pop one in the centre of each module.

Rocket, Tomato and Spinach - we will have Salad :)