Winter rain and new seeds

Winter has come back and dumped a lot of rain down on Perth. It is very windy and quite cold around 15 degrees celsius only. Both watertanks have filled up and the earth is moist and in good shape. The lettuces thrive and the tomatoes needed to be tied better onto their stakes to withstand the wild weather. It's real winter in Perth, but it compares well to similar days in April in Europe.

But as is has not been raining all the time, I could pick a sunny time during the afternoon to seed some zucchinis, cucumber, capsicums, eggplants, basil and a few sunflowers to attracts birds and insects.

I used three plastic seeding trays, filled them with compost and inserted one or two seeds into each segment. The idea is to see how the plants go and eventually cut the weaker one to have just one plant out, survive and start off strong strong. I seeded four to eight seeds in one or two rows, with the intention to repeat this process in about two weeks time after the next new moon.

Last year I marked each row off with the initials of the seeds but to no avail, as I did not give them the intention the seeds deserve. This year I left it, feeling comfortable that I remember what I seeded when the seedlings grow.

Both rainwater tanks have filled again after I started watering last week during temperatures around 23-24degrees. The rainfall record this year is looking better than last year although we have so far not reached average rainfall in any of the 2011 months:

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Total
2011	30.2	0.4	0	19.4	85	171.4	161	115.2	65.2				647.8
2010	0	0.2	40.4	25	88.6	51.4	142	63	43.6	20.6	11.6	17.4	503.8
Average	9.5	12.7	19.5	44.1	117.5	175.7	169.7	133.6	80.6	52.2	22.1	12.8	850

More details available here: http://www.watercorporation.com.au/R/rainfall.cfm