Courgettes v marrows

NEXT POST

Only a week ago, I planted several lots of seeds from the bumper pack I bought back in January: courgettes, marrows and onions. I hope I'm not too late to be starting now (like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman).

I am hugely impressed with the courgettes:

Especially when the marrows look like this:

I haven't grown onions before, so I don't know what to expect from them. I've planted some outside and some in the greenhouse. There are signs of life from the ones in the greenhouse, but I can't really believe I'm ever going to end up with real onions:

Finally, although it's nothing to do with the greenhouses, I couldn't ignore the colour of our new rhododendron, recently acquired from a garden centre and therefore, in my mind, cheating. Its colours are so bright that they practically broke my camera. Is there a colour equivalent of over-exposure - because that's what I was getting? The only way I could try to stop this picture burning out (or, as I say, the colour equivalent) was to under-expose and then brighten in Photoshop - and even that didn't completely work. Still, I'm not complaining: they look great:

NEXT POST

Getting out in the sun

NEXT POST

It's May 7th, the sun is out, and it's hot too.

Last weekend, I did a bit of 'landscaping' around my greenhouse. Well, I built a little path to the door and turned a small square around it that wasn't quite lawn or flowerbed, into flowerbed. This was thanks to some planks I'd got off the back of the truck belonging to the man who'd come to cut our trees a few weeks ago. They were heading for the skip and so he was happy for me to take them.

And this morning, confident that spring has finally sprung, I transplanted some of my parsnips and cauliflowers out of pots in the greenhouse into the new bed, and moved a pot of leek seedlings out there too.

Behind them are wild raspberries and some mint that my aunt gave me a few years ago. Above it all is a cherry tree, whose white blossom has been blowing around today.

The cauliflowers have been rather horribly chewed by something in the greenhouse, but I hope they will have escaped whatever it is by being outside. Could it be snails? I have been systematically removing them from the greenhouse - well, systematically on random occasions - but they never seem to be fully eradicated. It's not like Bill Gates and polio.

And I moved out all the repotted geraniums too. None have died, amazingly, but they don't seem to have grown either. I expect a bit of warm weather will bring them on.

So now the greenhouse is looking rather empty. Tomorrow I hope to change that by planting some more seeds - tomatoes especially, and I'll see what else I've got.

A final word of praise to rhubarb. I don't know where this lot came from, but it's doing very well with no help from me, even if it is hogging the light that some more of the parsnips and cauliflowers that I transferred into the same tub really need. And what's the plant on the right - please, anyone know? It never seems to do anything much. Is it some kind of iris maybe?

NEXT POST