25/02/15 – Picked out my final 12 plants

The last couple of weeks have seen the onions throw out loads of new leaves and continue to grow and thicken up. The lighting is still set to 12 hours per day in the grow chamber and this should come to line up with our daylight hours in a week or 2. As the grow chamber was becoming really cramped full of leaves and plants I’ve done my final selection down to my best 12 plants, which will be the 12 I plant in the onion bed in my greenhouse in a couple of weeks.

Heres a pic of my best 12…

Turned over the soil in the soil bed the other night and its all breaking up nicely.

The plan is to wire up my greenhouse heater and thermostat this weekend and get that switched on asap so I can monitor the temperatures on the colder nights and see how warm the heater keeps it. I’m hoping that it can maintain a minimum 12 Celcius and if it does I will be planting them out probably the 2nd week into March as they are desperate for some natural light now.

Here’s a pic of the best 5, and then a closer one of the biggest so far…

 

So all going good still so far. Can’t wait to get them out into the ground and under natural light to see how they come on then.

Over on the tomato front, got a few coming through now, just about to send out their 2nd set of leaves. Think I got 6 or 7 germinate out of 9 seeds.

No sign of any parsnips or chillis coming through yet though, although I have been told that this variety of parsnip and chilli can take 3-4 weeks so fingers crossed for them.

Couple of little shoots just showing from the carrot seeds…

Planted these in the cardboard toilet roll inserts to start off. Sowed 3 seeds per roll, with the intention of thinning to the best 1 when they are a couple of inch tall. Trying a little experiment of starting them off in these cardboard rolls indoors for the first couple of weeks, then I intend to plant the whole lot (cardboard insert included) straight into the barrels, where hopefully the cardboard will just deteriorate and leave the plant and root undisturbed to grow deep down in the barrels. I emptied all the sand in the barrels last weekend, gave it all a mix up and then filled them back up and watered well ready for these to go in when ready.

Will post some pics and an update when hopefully I get the onions into the ground in a couple of weeks.