Its a New Year Whopper!!

Happy New Year to everyone. Hope you all had a great time over the festive period. But now its January. For some people, this is a depressing month, but not for gardeners. The promise of spring is about and that means our love affair with plants is in full swing. I cant wait. I am full of plans and have so many seeds if I grow them all, I wont have room to plant everything out. 

With this in mind yesterday I headed to the plot to take stock and see what needs to be done. 

Things are still growing, but mostly coming to an end. The sprouts are still sweet and nutty but there are not too many left now. 

The leeks are the same, delicious but not many left

The Spring Greens are looking nice and so are my early broad beans. 

And I noticed today that my brave little chives are growing again.

One bed is full of stuff I left at the end of last summer, Dave and Bob, the pidgeon's have been snacking over the winter so now it looks very sad. 

The Kale and Kos are now shadows of their former selves. 

And finally the parsnips. I gave up on them before Christmas. We have had one very slight frost all winter. This means they have grown, but don't taste of anything. So I stopped trying them and left them to themselves. I decided to dig up the remaining few and get rid of them. The first couple came out pretty normally and then out came the subject of this blogs title.

It was a whopper.. I couldn't believe it as I dug it out. I photographed it next to my garden trowel to give some idea of size. 

The following parsnips were also very large. I ended up with this lot

Shame they are inedible .. 

But now onto new plants. A while ago I mentioned I was taking part in a Chilli growing trial with a group of gardeners I met online. Well 1st January was planting day. I had read it was worth planting the seeds into warm soil, so on 29th December I went out and got the pots ready with seed compost, and a bit of water, and popped them in the propagator to warm. 

It didnt take long to pop in the seeds and label each row with its number

I have now found out what the varieties are so if you really want to know you can read all about them on the Vegetablism Blog. 

I also entered into a light hearted competition with a couple of others to see who could grow the first chilli. For this I planted the Habanero Chilli I bought in Florida.

So thats the first planting of 2013 done. Now its a waiting game to see what happens next. 

I have bought my first useful gadget of the season. A nifty little ( and I mean little) set of watering roses.

You screw them onto the top of a used water bottle

You get a very fine flow of water which you can direct easily. Perfect for seedlings. 

And finally just a bit of Gibson news. Its his first birthday on 9th January, so next blog I will probably have some birthday pictures. 

Here he is surrounded by his Christmas presents.