Well, it is the first day of the school holidays, and it is raining again.  It definitely seems reminiscent of the last school holidays. That being said, we have no intentions of letting it dampen our plans. It just means wet weather gear may be in order after we do a few tasks around town. 

One of the places we need to visit is Greenfingers, a local landscaping place, which always results in a bit of giggling Many years ago we had to pull the car/trailer over as we had a completely distraught child in the backseat. Eventually, after calming him down, we managed to get out of him, that 'he didn't get his Green Fingers'. Later that year, we had a similar issue with 'Money Maker' tomatoes. Gardening with our children has always given us a few memorable moments as they often take things in directions we didn't see coming.

Along with tidying up four of the back gardens (side dressing with compost, and putting pea straw around the elephant garlic and onions), Connor and I have a few more seeds to sow today - his corn and his sunflowers. I also have a few more bean seeds I want to sow. This time, our purple climbers (King of the Blue). Thankfully, the latter can be done under cover. 

Our other seedlings are slowly appearing. And by slowly-I mean really slowly-perhaps the longest it has taken in some cases. It actually got to the point where I got the kids' old school 'home garden diaries' out and we looked out to look at how long it has taken for some seedlings to come up in the past. I was at the point of thinking perhaps I need to resow some and invest in a heat pad. I was right. It was the longest we have recorded (well that the kids had recorded). The zucchinis have been up for a week, along with the spring onions, and beetroot. The dahlias that I had sown only last week were up, but no tomatoes. We even started to question whether the seeds were getting too old. Then yesterday, the first one appeared (14 days for Connor's, and about 10 for mine). By the time we got home, more had come up. Still not huge quantities, but enough to reassure us.

The temperature has been so variable up here, that we will be in no hurry to plant our seedlings out. In the past few years, we have been lucky and have been able to plant them out, at quite a small size, and avoid multiple planting up. This year, I imagine our seedlings are going to planted up a few times, and remain in the porch area under cover, and with a bit more consistent heat. While there is so much variation between day and night, and the soil temperature remains cold, we will not be benefiting much from early planting out. Tomatoes, in particular, can be proned to leaf curl, when planted out too early, which can impact it's initial growth.