Harvest festival

My tomatoes are excelling themselves. I don't think I've ever had such a good crop - of anything.

A fuchsia from the past

My mum died in April 2015, more than three years ago, but I always think of her when I see these fuchsias. 

I took a cutting from the fuchsias outside her front door after she'd died but I wasn't hopeful they'd come to anything. They meant a lot to my mum in her very old age. They were given to her by her kind cleaner, Ruth. My mum always liked to tell me that Ruth had said she had so many fuchsias in her garden that she could have as many cuttings as she liked.

Well, I took some cuttings and brought them back to London and planted them in a pot. To start with, they behaved just like cut flowers, soon wilting and leaving a few apparently dead twigs. I think this is them below, in March 2016. 

I never got round to throwing them out. One day I spotted some minute green buds appearing lower down the stems. 

There was no turning back. They thrived, I repotted them, and they've been growing happily outside our front door ever since. 

Expensive tomato seeds: I take it all back

Last time I was whinging about the cost of the packet of tomato seeds I'd just bought. Well, I'm not whinging any more. I actually have twelve very decent-looking tomato plants from them, which must be a strike rate of close to 90 per cent.

Don't you love the smell of tomato plants - even before there are any tomatoes on them? It's a little sharp but somehow incredibly healthy.

So I take it all back, Thompson and Morgan, they are obviously quality seeds, if small in number.

I am watering the plants conscientiously with a special tomato feed supplement every evening and it seems to be working. The only problem with the plant above, the biggest, is that if there's a storm, it's so big and heavy that it could easily break. 

Still, the problems of success! 

These tomato seeds are like gold dust

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I try to avoid spending money on anything to do with the greenhouse: the idea is to grow things that will produce seeds or compost for next year - like a tech startup that's profitable from day one and doesn't need to rely on venture capital.

However, I usually buy the odd packet of seeds and this year, went down to my local garden centre to pick up a packet of tomato seeds and one packet of radish seeds. It was only when I got to the till that I found that the tomato seeds cost £4.99, which seemed excessive.

I didn't realise the price was written on the back of the packet and asked the person serving me whether she'd got it right. She showed me she had. I said they were expensive. She agreed and had a look at the packet. 

"Well, they're 'the exhibitor's favourite'," she read out. 

"Yeah right," I said. 

But I decided I'd give the exhibitor's favourite a go, and see whether they'd be my favourite too.

Back in the greenhouse, I opened the little white inner packet, which appeared to be empty. Oh no, there was a tiny little collection of about a dozen seeds in the bottom corner. There were so few that there was no question of trying to sprinkle them onto the soil: they'd all come out at once and land too close together. 

Instead, I extracted them each by hand and put them into the soil. Afterwards I thought there must have been a mistake. Surely some machine in a factory had gone wrong and failed to put the right number of seeds into the packet. 

I decided to email the manufacturers, Thompson and Morgan, point out their mistake and and ask for another packet. Back in the house, I had a proper look at the back of the packet and saw this:

"Average 15 seeds". How mean can you get? Surely the actual cost of the seeds is the least expensive part of their business? Still, if I'd looked, I'd have been warned. That's an average cost of 33 pence per seed. They must be literally worth their weight in gold.

So far, only the radish seeds are sprouting. I hope those precious tomato seeds aren't just going to disappear forever. 

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The start of the greenhouse year

Gosh! I haven't written this blog for more than eight months. To everyone who's been checking hopefully every day to see whether it had sprung back to life, I can only apologise.

But we're back, and I'm officially pronouncing this the first day of the new greenhouse year.

Why? Well, because I've emptied it out, hosed it down, wiped the windows and replaced the wooden benches. I know you're going to be impressed:

OK, there's nothing much to see yet, but it's like a blank canvas waiting for the artist to create.

This is the third year I've had the greenhouse and I have to admit that I'm a little less greenhouse-proud each year. My cleanup operation wasn't as thorough as last year. But I think that if I can start growing all sorts of exciting stuff in it, my attitude will improve.

I would say 'watch this space' but this isn't a space. But through this blog, watch the space in the greenhouse, which will become less space and more green as the summer progresses.

Au revoir.

A crumble in the making

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It's been a good year for blackberries in London. They're a couple of months early I think (as are the few mushrooms I've seen), but that's part of another debate.

Because they're early, I don't think people are expecting to be out picking, and I've only seen a couple of other people with their plastic containers in the woods and on the sides of paths.

But here's what I got from about 15 minutes of picking down at the end of my road.

And here's what they looked like when mixed with apples, some from our garden (again, early) and some garden rhubarb (the right time of year, I think). 

Now, stew with some sugar and a little water. 

Mix up flour with some margarine and more sugar and bake for 20 minutes or so. 

It was bigger than it looks there (the lumps of crumble are bigger than you think) and in fact I was able to make two decent-sized crumbles that were well-received. 

Living off the land! For the extras, once in a while. 

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The start of the 2017 season

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It's the Ides of March next week. The Ides of any month is really just half way through the month. So, for March, all that means is that we're 2.5 months out of 12 through the year, or a little over a fifth, but not a round number.

Of course, the Ides of March acquired its own significance through the murder of Julius Caesar in 44BC, but that's got very little to do with greenhouses, unless there's some connection with it being time to plant lettuce and other ingredients of a future Caesar salad. But that's not what I'm saying.

What I am celebrating - well, marking at least - is that today I did a kind of pre-Spring clean of the greenhouse, and I'm afraid there have been some sad losses over the Winter. How are you supposed to keep geraniums alive over the winter in a greenhouse? I was told not to water them too much, but frankly, during the cold days of November, December and January, I didn't feel like going outside, never mind watering anything in the greenhouse.

So I suppose I've only got myself to blame for the fact that about half the geraniums and a few other things seem to have died.

Today felt like the start of things because I reconnected the outside tap, confident that they'll be no more frost - or at least not enough to burst the outside pipe. That meant I could easily pull the hose into the greenhouse and give the survivors a well-earned drink of water.

A lot of the dead geraniums had become brown and dusty, so I have sorted them out, creating these pots where there was nothing left to save:

And these which look like they'll make it:

In some cases, the promise of great things this summer rests on the tiniest leaf:

But, hey, the more compact the plant at this stage, the healthier it'll be as it grows, I think.

Now I need to russell up some seeds and get ahead of the season - because that's what a greenhouse is for.

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