We will focus on easy to grow flowers and vegetables. Bring some envelopes and a pen to label your seeds. Seeds kindly donated by Linda. If you have seeds that you’d like to share, please do bring them!

We will have the following vegetables seeds for you:
1. Salad Leaves – Crunchy fresh leaves with a fantastic range of textures and flavours. Try sowing throughout the summer months, and you’ll be cutting fresh leaves for your sandwiches just 3 weeks later! Better still, they will continue growing so you can harvest them again and again.
2. Spring onions – Spice up your salads or stir frys with spring onions. Spring onions make easy vegetables to grow in pots, or sow them directly into the ground throughout the summer for a succession crops.
3. Radishes – Add peppery radish to your salad! Radishes can be grown in pots, or sow them directly into the ground throughout the summer for a succession of crunchy, colourful crops.
4. Peas – Peas are a trouble free crop that enjoy cooler weather. Sow them directly into the ground from March to June and look forward to the incredible sweet flavour of fresh picked peas from June to August. All they require is support for their stems – simply erect some chicken wire or netting between supports at each end of the row. You’ll be amazed at how good fresh peas taste and the more that you pick them, the more they produce!
5. Cucumber – The variety that Linda will be sharing can be grown indoors or outdoors in a warm sunny spot. It can either be used small for pickles or left to grow for use as a slicing cucumber. The plants set many lightly striped dark green fruit , with tiny white spines that come off easily. Quick to set fruit, bitter-free, and resists nearly all known cucumber diseases. (anthracnose, angular leaf spot, CMV, DM, PM, & scab!)
6. Beetroot – Often used in salads but equally tasty eaten warm and freshly boiled as a vegetable. Beetroot can be sown directly into moist ground from March to July. As they grow, thin the seedlings to about 5cm apart. From May to September you can look forward to harvesting your own colourful, succulent beetroot.

Flower seeds:
1. Sunflower – Just sow the seeds straight into the ground in a sunny, sheltered spot and watch them grow and grow and grow! Be sure to provide the stems with supports to grow the tallest sunflowers around.
2. Poppies – These colourful little annuals thrive in poor, dry soil and full sun so they are perfect for filling forgotten corners of the garden. Simply scatter them where you want them to flower and let them take care of themselves. Each year they will set seed which will grow the following summer, creating effortless drifts of colour.
3. Sweet Peas – Who can resist their delicious fragrance? And the more you pick, the more flowers they produce! The large seeds of sweet peas are easy to handle, but if sowing sounds complicated then buy them as sweet pea plug plants! A sunny spot, a supportive fence, and plenty of water is all these climbers need to produce your own ‘home grown’ cut flowers. Just keep an eye out for troublesome slugs and snails – they love the young shoots.
4. Nigella (Love in A Mist) – Such easy plants to grow. Simply scatter nigella seed across a patch of bare soil and let it look after itself! With jewel-like flowers and delicate ferny leaves, nigella is much tougher than it looks. As the flowers fade, this pretty plant will set seed for the following year. What could be simpler!

Proposed Agenda:

1. Welcome visitors
2. Member updates
3. Information on plants and seeds.

Date: Tuesday 03 May 2016

Time: 19:30-21:00
Venue: Christ Church, Winchester, SO23 9SR
Cost: £1 for tea/coffee and biscuits
Tel: 01962 658170