It’s been another mild week for the time of year. It’s also been a dry week with just a little bit of overnight drizzle on a couple of occasions. So far this month we’ve had just 12.6mm or 0.5in of rainfall. At this stage of the month, along with 2017, that makes it the equal driest November over the last 12 years.
However, the forecast is for much cooler temperatures for the rest of the month with temperatures below average for late November. As you can see, from the temperature records above, that cooler weather arrived on Sunday. With the good weather so far this autumn, we’ve made good progress getting tidied up at the allotment. Fortunately, in a way, one job we haven’t got round to doing is pulling down the old sweet pea frame and removing the spent haulms to the compost heap. We decided to have a look to see if there were any leftover pods with seeds inside.
I don’t think we’ve ever tried sowing sweet peas in autumn. There’s a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I never really believed that they’d germinate late on in the year and any young plants that did germinate would be difficult to keep through winter. The second reason is we usually order our seeds to arrive in spring and therefore we never have any seeds to sow in any case.
Last year our plot neighbour successfully grew some sweet peas sown in autumn which came into flower well before our spring sown plants.
I thought it might be worth giving an autumn sowing a try but I haven’t got any new seeds to sow. However, looking over our old plants from this summer there were a few seed pods still remaining on the dead stems.
We weren’t that sure there would be any seeds in the dried pods as they all seemed a bit small.
I was pleasantly surprised by the contents of those dried up seed pods. I have sown the seeds 4 to a cell in some decent sized cells.
It’s now a question of waiting to see if any of the seeds germinate. I’ve covered the cells with a cover to protect them from any marauding creatures. We usually get some mice in the greenhouse over winter.
