Mother Nature's mood swings

I wish I was just about to share pictures of the progress with the new greenhouse, but apparently, the few comfortable sunny days we had last week were just a tease. Mother Nature decided to share her mood swings with us and paint everything white again for a little while. Temperatures dropped again just under freezing point, and our greenhouse project came to a temporary halt.

Winter is back

So that was a little bit disappointing and surprising. I do not remember ever seeing snow in March in Denmark! Oh well, I've waited this long to have my greenhouse, I'm sure I can wait a couple more weeks. ;)

In the meantime, nothing is stopping me from starting the season indoors by the windows. A few weeks ago, I sowed cape gooseberry and 3 kinds of chili peppers They need to be sowed early as they take a long time to get to maturity. Some of the chili sprouted about a week ago and are growing nicely. I'm always so excited to see the young plants in the early season!

Chili "apache" 10/03/2013

This weekend, I sowed a few kinds of tomato and 5 kinds of herbs: Green and red basil, thyme, oregano and parsley. According to the little packets, they can all be sowed at this time of the year. I just hope the seeds I had leftover from last year were still usable and will sprout. I am not 100% sure that they were kept in the best conditions. I guess I will know soon enough. If nothing comes up, I'll have learned something!

herb tray

For sowing my things, I use mostly small plastic pots that I've kept over time when buying small plants or whatnot. I place them into plastic trays that are recycled from the kitchen. Ground meat plastic packs, for exemple, make perfect trays, as long as they are very well cleaned. I'm also always very interested by any transparent packaging. My herbs are sowed into empty grape packs. I find them perfect, as they already have small openings both on the bottom and top, and I can close them to create mini greenhouses! I've used them last year and found that I got good results. They are placed into the bottom part of a mini greenhouse, which transparent top broke last year.

Next time I go into a sowing round, though, I will probably use paper pots made of newspaper, since I now have used all my plastic ones. However, I'm still trying to figure out where I will place them, as I am also running out of windowsill space! Oh well, it's part of the charm of very early Spring. :)