Going it from Seed

I've been seed saving for a couple of years for those plants that you can sow direct but have never really had the space for a nursery.  So now that we're on five acres, its time to get serious.  We are going to get a proper shade house before Christmas but in the meantime, I thought I'd get started at the side of the house.  We've been given a number of seeds and cuttings from the fabulous people in our local growers network, and along with some seeds from Green Harvest, I got cracking.

This row continues to lots of pots with various cuttings that are doing quite well.  The first lot of cuttings from a garden visit four months ago are now happily growing in the garden, so my confidence was up.  I potted up a range of lovely seed, rigged up a makeshift shade cloth to cover them and between that and the shade of the bushes above, I thought it might make a perfect spot for growing.  What it actually made a perfect spot for was the local marsupial salad bar.  Overnight, one or many tiny creatures tip toed onto my little pots and dug up their dinner.  I wasn't a happy camper the next morning, but chalked it up to the lessons of gardening somewhere new, so I made another plan and started again.  Once more, the nocturnal marsupial acrobats made a raid, managing to climb inside the elaborate structure I'd built to keep them out, and feasting on my seeds.  So I've resigned myself to cuttings for the next little while until the shade house is built and can rest in the knowledge that I've helped the local ecology to survive another day.....