Sorry this has taken me a while to get around to replying to. Your tunnel looks great! Really looking forward to seeing how these progress. What varieties do you have there?

We have quite a few varieties in there. Cornflowers, Nigella, Snap Dragon, Globe Amaranth, Statice, Gypsophila, 2 types of Zinnias and about 5-6 different types of Everlastings/Wildflowers.

The zinnias are ready to pot up to their individual trays already as well as one of the wildflowers so they are progressing well. The paper daisies have been really proficient for us and we will probably have 1,000 plants in the ground by the end of May. They don’t flower as quickly over winter but there’s where I’m banking on the quantity getting us through.

We have a patch of about 140 Zinnias in the home garden that we planted on the 7th of February that are coming along very nicely now.

Really just putting in the groundwork for Spring though. Was hoping to be all up and running before Mother’s Day in May but we will miss that boat

Amazing, 1000 plants. Do you plant them all out by hand?

I was going to ask how they fare over winter? Over here there's not too much point starting things off too early as they will get leggy or sulk (or both!). There's a few hardier annuals that we start off now like Sweet Peas but most everything else we wait until it warms up.

At the end of summer though we want to try to sow more biennials like Honesty and more Foxgloves / Digitalis - we always seem to miss the boat on these things.

The first lot of paper daisies we planted in September 2024 and they were described as annuals which would die off come first frost. I’m still picking flowers off them still. Where we are we probably only get 5-10 frosts a year and they are relatively light frosts with the daytime winter temps still hitting mid teens on the low end.

Summer has been our big obstacle. This year we didn’t receive any rain for 2 months and we had a stretch of 10 days over 40 degrees. To combat that this year when planting we will rotary hoe the soil, which is a sandy loam, mix in some compost and garden soil and lay down rows of drip irrigation. It’s worked wonders at home so hoping we can replicate it out at the plantation. It’s about 60km from where we live so need to make it a bit more automatic.

I think the big advantage of this site is you can track how all the seeds and plants go. This is still our first year doing this type of growing so it’ll be handy to look back on in 12 months time and be able to plan accordingly

Hopefully you have a bit more luck with those varieties this year. There’s a sense of achievement when you successfully grow a plant from seed as opposed to buying one from the shops

These are the Zinnias and Wildflowers I’ve potted up. I go around 40-50pots per tray which is a good result.

the zinnia patch is just over a month old in the ground and the first buds are just coming through which is exciting. I was going to extend the side garden with paper daisies but i think the speed of the Zinnias and wildflowers will provide a better option for the short term.

Really awesome to see – thanks for sharing! (And you're making good use of the new ability to add photos to replies )

Your summer conditions sound tough to grow in. We experienced a drought here last year as well which made things tricky for a lot of our crops. Our tomatoes struggled a bit from erratic watering and our potatoes ended up much smaller than usual compared to other years.

The drip irrigation and improving the soil with compost sounds like a really sensible approach, especially with the distance you have to travel to the site. I'm actually in the planning stages of my own automated irrigation setup using solar power, although thankfully our plot is much closer (and smaller!)

It's interesting seeing the zinnias multi-sown as well. I'm very used to growing veg and thinning the weaker plants. I looked it up and zinnias are usually recommended to sow around late March–April here in the UK. Yours look like they’re doing really well!

You definitely won’t find any of my growing techniques in any horticulture books. You’re planting season aligns with ours where they recommend October to January. For this first year I’m just going to grow everything all year and keep track of the best times when to sow them all for next year. The paper daisies which are going well in our garden were sown in the middle of winter and it took forever for them to get established but once planted early spring they flourished. But the yield was maybe 20 plants per tray whereas at the moment it’s closer to 40. These are the things I’m most interested in learning.

I was basically working full time so never had the time to really invest properly in all of this. Next year once I know what’s going on I can do sample beds of thinning out plants, sowing seeds directly in the ground etc. It’s all a learning experience.

The way I sow the quantity of plants is determined by how many seedlings I get per tray haha. The paper daisies and wildflowers are around 8 per pot, most of the others are 6 and the zinnias are around 4. There are probably many horticulturists up in arms about this method haha.

With the irrigation I will have the 1 high pressure water line down the middle of a row. From that I’d have 2 sets of manifolds with each have 4 double tap timers. This will let me do 8 beds per manifold so about 2,000 plants each. So essentially I can keep the water pressure on at all times and just program the timers to come on. Because each bed will be its own variety I can adjust the water for each variety also. It’s much more efficient then my first attempt of just lawn sprinklers.

I am looking forward to everyone’s vegetable posts though. I think come spring time I’d like to put in some beds of vegetables

I was thinking of doing up a solar one myself but there’s a few people around the town who may see a solar panel and decide it might look good at their house. I think automation is definitely the way to go though. Takes the guess work out of it all