The March greenhouse, sowing tomatoes, peppers and dahlia

It’s been a hard year so far, after my decision to hang back from early seed sowing and instead wait for the promise of warmer days in March. Yes there are lots of benefits, including the ability to sow seeds without the desperate need for heat mats and lights, but I’ve found it hard going to have so little to tend in the greenhouse.

Therefore I’m hoping that getting my main greenhouse crops underway will help get me garden spirited again.

I’m starting with my four chosen varieties of tomato, which will spend all year growing in the greenhouse.

• Black Krim
• Kellogg’s Breakfast
• Barry’s Crazy Cherry, and,
• Teton Du Venus

All four have a longer growing season, from 70 to 90 days, so it would be a bit of a risk to try to grow them in the garden. The risk being that we’d be able to grow plants to harvest stage in the time our garden environment allows.

Hence, these are destined to live their lives in the greenhouse where I can start them a little earlier and keep them cropping a little later.

Along with them I’ve sown my tried and trusted peppers, King of the North. These have just been so reliable and such heavy croppers for me that it would be a hard job for anyone to tempt me away to try something different.

Lastly, because I absolutely love when the garden is full of colour, I’ve sown my dahlia seeds.

The reason I’m sowing seeds rather than growing from tubers is that tubers are so much more expensive than seeds, yet it’s so easy to grow dahlia from seed. So I thought it would be a good thing to do this year and include it in the many Grow Along With Eli videos we’ll be publishing this year.

The seeds for this year are

• Yankee Doodle Dandy, which was the first flower I ever grew from seed
• Dandy, dwarf this is very similar but a much smaller plant, and,
• Destiny’s Teacher. These seeds were a gift from a friend, so fun to try growing from their seeds.

I will also be growing dahlia from tubers but this will be a separate topic we’ll be covering.

Just getting things started makes me feel so much better, like spring if definitely on the way. Not long now till we’ll have properly warm days and much less chance of frost overnight.

I still have so much to sow and so much more colour and food to bring to the garden, so bring on season 2023.