Christmas Hyacinths

Yesterday, I took 2 children each from Classes 1, 2 and 3 who helped plant 85 hyacinth bulbs back in October.  Since then, the bulbs have been covered with plastic and hessian sack and kept in the polytunnel, developing their root system and waiting for Christmas.

So tentatively, we pulled back the coverings (I had been periodically checking them, but hadn't been up for over a week). To our delight, most of them had shoots of about 2 - 3 cm and looking healthy.  We also checked on my mini daffodils which I hope to sell in the last week of term.  They're looking good too!

As you can see, we had some slugs in with the hyacinths.  The kids collected them all and rehomed them elsewhere in the garden.  Thankfully, they hadn't eaten the tender shoots, so we took it that they were just hibernating in the damp dark conditions under the sacking and not doing anything else! Phew!

We re-covered the bulbs with just the hessian which lets in light, but not direct sunlight and will keep checking them until the end of the week.  Then, we'll bring them into the classrooms and hopefully, getting our timing right, they will bloom for Christmas. Fingers crossed!

We then did some watering of the geraniums which are wintering in the greenhouse, planted some salad leaves and checked on our broad beans.  There's not much to do at the moment and its quite a bitter wind. Luckily being on a hill, we haven't been affected by the bad flooding, but everything is saturated and very muddy.  So it was just some housekeeping really.

Da-dah! Hyacinths growing!

However, the slugs joined in too!

We found these eggs?  What are they?







The daffodils are looking healthy too



Jaidon re-covering them with hessian sack

In January, we start our new growing season and we have a large box brimming with seed packets.  It all starts after Christmas!