Not Slugs, Mice!

Yes, I had jump to blame the humble slimy slug for eating my seedlings over easter, but after sowing pumpkins and squash I came back the next day to find the dug up and chewed to pieces! Kind of cuter thought than slugs, but never the less, they wiped me out of giant pumpkin and sweetcorn seeds! I’m going to have to start again, again again.. but a lesson learnt that this can happen! Cute little furry buggers. Luckily, being mice and not slugs the seeds that had grown were left alone, just the ones waiting to germinate had been eaten. I found the most likely place the mice were getting into the box and blocked it off best I could. Re-ordered giant pumpkins and sweetcorn and re-planted some sunflowers and squash that had be attacted too. Hopefully this will be the end of it and we can get on with growing the damn things!

Slugs Suck!

Ok so slugs don’t suck they just eat everything! (except “conveniently” not weeds)

Somehow they are getting inside the box and when they did while I was away over Easter, they ate almost everything insight. So much so that you wouldn’t have even known that seeds had been planted. I had to sow yet another round of pumpkins, squash and sunflowers and I’m going to have to buy another round of sweetcorn seeds. Luckily the tomatoes are still ok as are the beans and cucumbers.

Bastard slugs.

Looking at the plot in general there are weeds every where, there is going to be a great deal of work needing done to stop them growing over.

Sunflowers Take 2

So, after investigating the seeds planted in The Box before the frost, it appears that the squash and pumpkins survived and are growing well, the popcorn is not germinating as yet and the sunflowers seeds have started to rot. This may be due to that sharp spell of snowy weather or it may be due to the seed being bad. One, however, has started growing out of that batch, but one is not enough. Therefore, I have bought I new set of sunflower seeds and have now just planted 15 of them! These Russian Giant’s are supposed to reach a height of 4.5 metres (15 foot in old money) with flowers 30cm across. I need to get the sunflowers started so they have a headstart on the beans that will be growing up them. Hopefully this batch will grow well and fast because the beans will need to be sown soon, and I’d like a long growing season on these to see how tall we can get them!

Investigating the box further I found small slugs have managed to get in, the only way I could think of is that maybe there is a gap in the lid on the hinge side. I’ll need to detective it further, but I placed some beer traps inside and scattered the floor with (organic) slug killer to be sure. They’ve managed to wipe out the first seedlings of lettuce and nibbled a few other plants, something with have to be done to ensure the next batch of lettuce survives!

Squash-a-growing!

The box is doing its job nicely. The squash and pumpkins have started to grow, unlike the sunflowers and popcorn, which probably suffered in the snowy weather straight after I planted them. I’ve got some more sunflower seeds on order and more popcorn seeds I can sow. We’ve also got radishes, leaks, onions, lettuce and beetroot sprouting. Problem is the box is now full, until that is, something is ready to plant out! Grow plants grow!

Some sweetcorn were sown today, but we really need to get the beans and peas on the go. The bean trelis is almost finished, still haven’t worked out where the peas might go.

Thermometer Results

So here are the results from the thermometer test of The Box. The top photo is the inside and outside temperatures when I opened the box. The themometer isn’t very accurate but it seems to show a good growing temperature inside, so the box is definately doing its job. The other two photos are the max in and out and the minimum in and out respectively. The maximum in is showing it registered 33.7, which is just crazy! The minimum says the outside reached -2.3, which also can’t be right either, there definately was no frost. Still, at least it is showing a postive relative difference in temperature. Though at these possible temperatures I’ll have to keep an eye on those plants in the box during the summer!

Thermometer

I bought a digital thermometer yesterday to test out The Box. It has an inside and outside (via a long wire) sensors, shows the time and records the maximum and minimum temperatures. I’m going to use it to take some readings of inside and outside the box and see compare the inside and outside maximum and minimum over a few days and nights. It’s going to be really interesting to see how much warmer (if at all) inside the box really is compared to outside. Plus see how warm it really is in there at the moment for the seeds to germinate.

This photo is just measuring inside and outside my bedroom at the moment, not The Box!