Thinking big this year

After my hopes of 150 broad bean plants, I ended up with about half actually sprouting;  of the 40 or so that went into the paper tubes, only one emerged.  And I finally gave up on the remaining 30ish small pots too, resowing them with snap peas over the weekend.  The broad beans I transplanted at the allotment look good and are growing well.  The woolly sowing method (a wad of fluffed up sheep's wool in the bottom of each pot, a seed on top, a bit of potting soil to cover), ensured little to no transplant shock.

Now instead of a stack of eight trays of little pots of broad beans, I have eight trays of snap peas;  the first tray has begun to come up (sown 31 March) and I'll start transplanting them out when I can see a little root at the bottom of the pots.  It's still been cold, not really getting past 10C during the day.  I thought broad beans and snap peas would grow regardless, but the broad beans were incredibly slow to sprout, and the snap peas aren't much better.  Hopefully I get more than 50% sprout rate (though 50% is much preferable to the 30% I sometimes get).

I do want the snap peas to hurry up so I can start on the climbing beans next.  Same woolly sowing method as the other two.  Up until this year I thought I had more than enough trays and pots, but actually I don't!  100+ small pots is insufficient to my needs this year:  this year I'm thinking big.  On my garden plan (the first time I've ever really written one), I've got the ideal number of each type of plant I want to grow.  For instance, 150 broad bean and 350 snap pea plants (which is how many seeds I bought).  20 tomato plants--I sowed more seed than this to be sure I'd get 20 good ones--100 climbing bean plants, 50 corn plants, 40 squash plants (none of these sown yet).  I didn't take into account my stock of pots and trays.