Mini Tunnel

One of my garden recycling projects I didn't talk about in the last post was my milk bottle tunnel. I wasn't very sure that it would work so, although you can see it in some of the pictures if you squint, I left it out of the round up. But Today I was jumping up and down happily. You can see seedlings. So let's get down to the nitty gritty.
The two troughs by the balcony windows have housed salad leaves for the past two years. It works out fairly well in spring, autumn and - when mild - in winter but come summer and it's a mess of bolted greens. A fairly pretty mess with the long spikes of rocket flowers but not a very productive one.

I now like to grow lettuce under the cover of other things. They did well under the black current last year and in the shade of other pots. The troughs need rethinking. I'm tempted of fill them with alpines at some point but this year I've gone for the simple approach. Scattering poppies and other flowers that don't mind the baked, dryish soil.

I also found a pack of leftover lettuces from last year. I figure that if I can get this going early enough and pull it out by May (perhaps to be replaced by the start of my alpine collection) I'll have a decent crop and a pretty tub at the end of it.

For the early start I've sown them out under the protection of half a milk bottle. After a windy moment I weighed it down with a few pebbles. It's taken just less two weeks to germinate and I thinned the extras out today.