Earth is hard as iron!

I woke up this morning to what was obviously going to be a brilliantly sunny day. I was full of enthusiasm to get outside, but alas everything was frozen solid. There was no way I could do anything to the ground, although there is a lone snowdrop in flower. The ones further down the garden are slower. I just had a tidy around, and had a mini bonfire in the bbq; the small bits of rose and grape prunings from last weekend, and a few other twiggy bits that wouldn't go in the compost. After getting frozen feet and watering eyes from the smoke I retired into the kitchen to wash some more flower pots, and sow some chillies that arrived in the post from Mr Dinkle of the Grapevine forum. I'd got the pots of soil into the heated propagator last night, so put in 2 each of the prairie fire and dorset naga seeds he sent.

As the French Black tomato seed was so slow germinating, I removed some seeds from the last wrinkled fruit on the windowsill last Saturday and sowed 3 along with some of the tigerella seeds I'd had to buy after losing my ones from last year. They were all up within 3 days and moved up to the light cupboard. I'm amazed at how quickly the plants are growing. The chillies in the picture were only sown on Boxing day, the tomatoes a week later, and the lettuce another week on. All the seeds have been planted directly into the 3 inch pots, so I haven't had to do any transplanting yet, although the roots are showing through the bottoms of the pots already. I've got them standing in hydrolucca (expanded clay pellets), and keep that a bit moist to add a bit of humidity to the air. The temperature is still maintaining around 20-25c, although I've now got 6 lamps in there which helps.
The chillies below are the same ones I posted on 16th January. They still haven't seen any real daylight but seem to be thriving!