Courgettes v marrows

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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:

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Getting out in the sun

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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?

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The caulis are coming

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Yesterday my eye was drawn to the window by a sudden bright light in the garden. The sun had come out on January 30th.

I went into the greenhouse and found it was warm enough to produce those delicious soily, leafy smells that are as much a part of the pleasure of having a greenhouse as what you see in it. 

Could it really be 29 degrees, or do I have a thermometer programmed to tell people what they want to hear?  

Well, maybe it's right. The cauliflower seeds I planted three weeks ago have already burst into life. 

Maybe Homebase's promise of "Cauliflower All The Year Round" will be fulfilled. Or at least, I could have a glut of cauliflower all at once, in about April or May.

And there's more. Last weekend I managed to sprinkle a big pot with Parsnip Student seeds ("very good long-rooted narrow cored heritage variety"). They're not due to be harvested until October at the earliest, but there's no harm in giving them a good run at it. 

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Ten vegetables for 2016

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I have too many half used packets of vegetable seeds. I don't want to waste them, but nor do I want to waste my time preparing the soil and planting them if they're too old ever to germinate. I'm abandoning them for the moment.

Instead, as kind of new year resolution, I went crazy and spent £3.99 on a Homebase bumper pack of ten kinds of vegetable seeds. They're not particularly exotic - just things like  marrow, parsnip, spinach and onion. But they come with easy to use directions about when and how to plant, and so I'm thinking that if I can just get them out of the packet and into the soil at the right time, it could be an easy way to produce something useful from the greenhouse this year.

I started today with the 'all-the-year-round cauliflower'. I can't be bothered to plant seeds with measured spaces between them, so I just scatter them into a pot, cover them with a bit more soil, and will transplant the best ones when they pop up.

If I keep it up, by February, I should have leeks, onions and parsnips under way too.

The instructions don't say anything about a greenhouse, but I'm assuming it will be frost-free, and that they should have a better chance in there than outside. Of course I'll have to water them, although the greenhouse seems permanently damp at this time of year, so that shouldn't be too much work.

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Ripening tomatoes are like life

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...a race between maturity and decay.

I'm hoping that in my greenhouse and in my life the maturing process will edge ahead temporarily. 

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Doing the bees' work on cucumbers

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Bees are in short supply round the gardens of West London, as my neighbour was remarking yesterday. 'Do you think I need to pollinate my marrows?' she asked.

I really didn't know, but it made me scurry off to the internet to see whether I should be pollinating my cucumbers. Even if we had swarms of bees, the cucumbers are in the greenhouse, so they'd be out of reach.

The cucumbers have been doing well - indeed I pride myself in spotting their early promise. Now they're almost taking over the greenhouse, especially since I gave them a piece of string along the roof to climb along.

But amid the profusion of leaves and flowers, there's not much sign of a cucumber.

So I was grateful to someone called Gary Pilarchik for his helpful YouTube video on how to 'hand-pollinate' cucumbers.

According to Gary, you just swivel a paint brush inside the male flowers, collecting pollen, and then do the same inside the females.

I had a go, and found the same problem Gary had in his video - a lack of females. You're supposed to identify females by their being single flowers, while males grow in clusters. And females will have cucumbers growing between them and the stem. (Although doesn't that mean there's no point in trying to pollinate them any more?)

Male cluster

Female flower with growing cucumber

In the end, I just swivelled willy-nilly - thinking it didn't matter if I couldn't tell whether I was collecting or distributing pollen.

Some of the advice talks about it being a messy job. I found it unusually clinical for something in the garden, but it's true that I've been left with a stubborn stickiness on my wrists and arms from the pollen.

Oh well, I've done what I can.

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Cutting those geraniums down to size

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Many of the plants that I inherited from my mother are geraniums. But they were lanky - with long featureless stems leading to the odd flower or leaf at the top. They looked like creatures from a planet with low gravity.

Fortunately, my mother-in-law knows about this kind of thing, and so when she came to lunch I persuaded her to get to work with the secateurs while I filled some spare pots with my nutritious compost.

We soon had a collection of new pots with the cut stems she had designated as new plants, and a much more respectable collection of the original plants with their dead leaves and flowers removed.

My mother-in-law told me to water the pots thoroughly but then to leave them, rather than constantly rewatering them while the new plants get established. I don't know why, but perhaps it encourages the new roots to grow because they have to dig deeper in search of water?

Good work - except I now have twice as many geraniums to look after.

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