welsh hills again

I have been a serious, obsessive gardener for years, but mainly between the months of March and July.  Any earlier and it is too cold and wet for much venturing out for softies like me.  Any later and I used to lose my head of steam and, after a glorious spring and early summer,  subside into drab August, better spent at the seaside.  By the time we all came home again and the kids went back to school there hardly seemed any point. But now I have got much more interested in late season gardening.  I think this is partly getting older and no longer feeling immortal.  If I only have another ten or twenty or thirty years, writing off half of them as gardening time seems a bit stupid.  And it is partly seeing the gardens of those, like Karen at Artist's Garden , who make their gardens sing at a time when mine used to be all dryness and flop. So on that front I have made real changes.  But seed sowing, the sign of a real gardener,  was always ...

I was a passionate gardener for ages before I got into seed sowing.  I bought plants, read gardening books, wandered round gardens and made notes but I felt that sowing seeds was for real gardeners, real experts, too tricky, too serious for me.  It wasn't helped by a few forays into sowing hardy annuals with those free seed packets you tend to get with magazines or thrown in when you are buying something else.  I know the spiel: sow directly where they are to flower, fine tilth, thin out and all that garbage.  In my experience seeds mostly fail to germinate and the glorious patch of colour of your imagination becomes a straggly weedy bit of the garden where one or two puny love in a mist fail to make an impact on the chickweed and the dandelions. Having a greenhouse has made a difference.  Under the controlled conditions of seed trays and watering and benevolent warmth, seeds do germinate and I do notice and I do look after them.  I have discovered that g...