Brilliant Birthdays - Part Three

Last Saturday Nicky and I had a joint birthday celebration at mum & dads with our respective other halfs and Liz and Nick, and enough Chinese take-out to feed an army.  It was a brilliant evening and Nick gave me a wonderful selection of seeds to plant out in my garden, with a hand-made storage box to keep the spares in, and a selection of useful extras to help me plant and tend them.

It even has little dividers to keep everything organised	The seeds from inside the box
Garden Goodies

Not only that but they also gave me a rather nice cheque to complete my seed selection with and buy some of the bulkier seeds such as peas and beans.  Rather fortunately we were planning to visit RHS Wisley on Sunday to see the butterflies so I stopped off in the shop on the way home and put that money to good use

My additional seed purchases

The butterflies were nice too!

Brilliant Birthdays - Part Two

Carrying on the birthday goodness, Nicky bought me a subscription to Kitchen Garden magazine.  I don't read many magazines but last year mum bought me a subscription to Good Food and I discovered that when the mag is about things I'm interested in (as opposed to celeb gossip etc) I actually quite enjoy reading them.  The first issue was consumed over a cup of tea and was excellent so I'm looking forward to reading the rest and getting some useful tips for my gardening (and some lovely free seeds to plant too :D)

Brilliant Birthdays - Part One

Now that the weather's cheering up again I'm starting to plan what I want to do in the garden this year and this has coincided rather neatly with my birthday! I asked mum & dad for a wormery and, despite thinking I'm a little mad, they bought me this little beauty - a Worm City Wormery

Which came with lots of useful accessories - a book on worm composting, a PH monitor, worm food and a quick-start guide and two more expansion trays (which sit between the tap and the roof and are rotated as the worms process the food waste into compost).  Also included was a sturdy kitchen caddy (which I forgot to photograph) to store food waste in before giving it to the worms.

And most importantly of all, lots of big, fat, wriggly worms!

First impressions are that it's smaller than I expected... but not small - the shot above shows one of the three trays after I emptied and entire bucket of coir into it (plus some worms!) so it holds a surprising amount of stuff.  At the moment it's in the kitchen so that the worms don't get too cold but eventually it will go outside.  I'm keeping them in for now mainly so that they'll get settled and start eating quicker - they slow down in the cold and I want them to get munching and breeding so that I'll have lots and lots of worms to make me compost for the summer.  I was slightly worried they might try to get out but so far not one seems to have made a bid for freedom so it looks like I won't have to rescue too many worms from the kitchen floor!