Garden Centre

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Late and lovely August flowers

Now the reason this is such a late bloomer is my failure as a gardener. I grew these lupins from seed, but for a variety of reasons they got completely neglected in the seed tray, to the point that they were chucked outside the greenhouse door, on the assumption that the degree of aridness of potting medium that they’d endured for over a week meant that any seedlings that might have been about to emerge were effectively dead.

After a month, green shoots appeared in the abandoned tray that I hadn’t managed to move to the rubbish heap. But I’ve had that scenario before and found myself tending a tray of dandelion or chickweed so I just ignored the evidence that something was happening.

It wasn’t until true lupin leaves appeared that I rescued the poor things and gave them some tender loving care, and to my vast surprise, they have turned out just as well as the established lupins, but almost exactly a month behind, which is just about the length of time they spent on the rubbish heap …

Labels: garden flowers, growing plants from seed, lupins

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:20 AM 0 Comments

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Friday, May 1, 2009

Six months of greenhouse ownership

I can’t believe it’s six months since I left himself in the garden with 275 bits of labelled aluminium and polycarbonate and hid indoors, typing madly and pretending that I had a deadline to meet. I did make lots of tea, of course, but that was almost my entire contribution to the process of setting up a greenhouse.

And now I can’t imagine how I could live without it. We’ve only had one failure to date – the passion fruit seeds have simply not germinated, despite people telling me that as long as the seeds were super fresh they would zoom, vine-like, out of their pots and loop around the greenhouse. They haven’t.

But apart from that, everything has germinated, everything has bloomed, nothing has curled up and died. And the most amazing thing of all is that our garden season has been brought forward by about a month, just by having this clement, frost-free place in which to raise or overwinter my plants.

The downside: well I am getting quite fed up with carrying trays of plants in and out of the greenhouse twice a day – it’s a shame that the only flat space in the garden on which said trays can be set to harden off is the entire length of the garden away from said greenhouse. Bad planning on my part, but there’s nothing to be done about it now, unless I move the shed and fill in the pond and … well, you get the point. And also, it’s a time vortex. I go out just to check how many borlotti beans or lupins have germinated and it’s a whole hour before I realise that I said I’d only be a minute …

Labels: borlotti beans, greenhouse, lupins, passionfruit

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:02 AM 0 Comments

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