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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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Saturday, March 21, 2009

Greenhouse gardening March

I really don’t know how I coped without my greenhouse. Six months after I cursed it roundly and retreated to the house to make tea and treacle tart for my other half – who then spent two days putting the 471 piece monster together while regularly being fortified with said tea and tart, I spend at least an hour a day in it.

Here’s what I’ve got going on:

• Three trays of broad beans
• One tray of native trees - a sort of goody bag of who knows what? So far what = one seedling ...
• One tray of passionfruit seeds (an experiment – can a passionfruit vine be grown from the seeds of a supermarket passionfruit? We’re going to find out …)
• Six pots of sweet peas
• Thirty-six pots of nasturtium seedlings (don’t ask, other half got carried away with himself)
• Three pots each of Love-lies-bleeding, sage and dill, which will be the nucleus of my new herb bed
• Twenty-four pots of seedling alpine strawberries
• Twenty transplanted celeriac seedlings
• Thirty-six pea seedlings in toilet roll inners
• Three over-wintered fuchsias
• Two tubs of wallflowers

The passionfruit is going to be interesting because if they do grow I shall probably have to give them all away, not having a single south facing fence that isn’t already covered with: jasmine, winter-flowering clematis, pyracantha, Iceberg rose and fig tree. All the people I’ve spoken to say that the secret to growing passionfruit is heat and freshness of the seeds, and as these went straight from fruit to pot in about forty-five seconds, I’m confident that freshness isn’t an issue.

There is a bit of an issue in the greenhouse though – I can’t actually turn round in a hurry because if I do, I end up knocking something to the floor. I just hope that the weather remains gracious so that I can start planting things out next weekend!

Labels: broad beans, fuchsia, greenhouse gardening, iceberg rose, march greenhouse, passionfruit, peas, wallflowers

The All Seasons Gardener at 5:55 AM 0 Comments

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