Sewing seeds and taking cuttings with #HDYGG?

I’m leaving Dubai for 2 weeks on the 8^th of September with hubby and as there will be no one there to water the plants, I am officially shutting the garden down for the rest of summer.

The sandpit has had a good weeding

The grass patch at the side of the house is being prepared for seeding

I’ve decided to spend the next few weeks researching and experimenting with cuttings and seeds, so that I can learn what grows, where it grows and under what conditions.

I've taken cuttings from several plants in the garden and they are staying alive by refreshing the water daily, inside the house and within 3 days roots were growing. I'm also attempting to grow an avocado.

Although sweet peas, nasturtiums and poppies need regular temperatures of below 15c to flower, they will provide plenty of leaves, they also require temperatures under 30c to germinate so they are sitting in the conservatory where the cat and dog spend most of their time and the air con keeps the room at a max of 30c.

There is plenty of natural light in the room and I will probably plant them out into pots to grow and hopefully flower in that room.

The three basil plants are the only survivors of my previous planting trial and they now have a woody stem, so I’m hopeful they’re bush out. They sit on the window ledge outside, which gets sun for part of the day and I water them daily.

The tomatoes grew into decent sized plants, but didn’t flower. This may have something to do with them being planted in recycled water cooler bottles. It’s best to use unglazed pots for planting outside in the heat. The soil in plastic pots reaches temperatures of 50c and moving them into grow bags did nothing for them.

Once autumn comes I will sew more seeds into clay pots and purchase a couple of tomato plants from the garden centre along with some tomato plants. I am quite prepared to move them into the conservatory as the whole villa is tiled and and easy to clean.

As well as planting some tomato seeds I’m also experimenting with spring onions, lettuce and chilli. They too are being kept on the window ledge with the basil.

This tomato and marigold seeds were sown on Thursday, this photo was taken 3 days later, unbelievable that anything can grow in this heat.

I successfully grew marigolds, petunias and celosia this year so I’m focusing on growing them again. These seeds are sitting in direct sunlight for most of the day and are watered daily.

Although these seeds are being grown in pots in compost, for purposes of germination time. They will be sown directly into the sandpit as plants that flower in Dubai do better without root disturbance, although I grew the last seedings in recycled newspaper pots, few of the plants flowered and the ones that did were very pale in comparison to the illustration on the seed packet. I will mix some compost into the top layer of soil before doing so.

You can see the celosia has very shallow roots.

My next job is to find out what jobs I need to do around the garden to prepare for autumn.