Seeds to Stems - March

Having promised myself a year of flowers, as well as going to my floristry classes, and turning most of my veg patch over to flowers, I’ve also signed up to the Life on the Lot Seeds to stems workshops.

For the next 7 months a small group of fellow flower enthusiasts get to spend a morning a month on the Wirral Flower Farm learning how to be flower farmers. Yesterday was the first session, and it was great!

Despite the awful weather forecast, we all arrived wrapped up well and ready to learn. My camping and hiking days came in useful when it came to layering up against the 45 mile an hour winds that the Met office had forecast, incorrectly I must add – Im a 100% sure there were gusts of much more strength, strong enough to know people off their feet. They were right about the very chilly feels like temperature, but my full thermal base layer, and an older coat that’s too big for me so I can fit a lot of clothes including a very thick hoodie under it did the job.

The farm, owned by the very lovely Jenny, is based on the Wirral at Claremont Farm (absolutely amazing farm shop by the way, and I feel like a monthly treat will have to come home from there with me!). As you walk up the road the first thing you notice is the huge poly tunnel, which is even more impressive when you get in it, absolutely stuffed with seedlings and baby plants. Hundreds of them! Then as you come into the farms field, you come across the huge sweet pea tunnel. I cannot wait to see this in full flower, its going to be amazing.

Following a very cold and windy tour of the farm, we got to come inside the poly tunnel and learnt how to sow our own seeds. All of the seeds we got to use have been harvested from the farm, how fabulous is that. We learnt all about types of plants, hardy, half hardy, tender, annuals etc and the best times of year to sow them. I love the fact that we came away with “homework”, our task between now and the next visit to the farm is to look after the seeds we planted yesterday and bring them back to practise pricking out. I’m very rubbish at pricking out, I tend to feel that if a seed has made the effort to grow for me then I can’t kill it and will spend hours planting them all out. I also have a problem with restraining myself when sowing seeds and often can’t help but sow the whole package. And I’m notorious bad at labelling my seeds but yesterday I was on it. We are flower farmers now, the weakest seedlings won’t grow the strongest flowers and labelling is a must!

So what did we sow, Sweet peas, Daucus, Ammi, Cornflowers and Wrinkle Cress – photos to follow as they grow – and they are now safely tucked up in my greenhouse.

If you fancy visiting the Wirral Flower Farm, Jenny hosts loads of workshops over the season and also hosts pick your own sessions. Details are on her website www.lifeonthelot.co.uk and her Instagram is full of pictures of flowers so well worth a follow @life_on_the_lot