In the Greenhouse

Runner beans and courgettes

Those of you who are kind enough to have become familiar with this blog will know that The Greenhouse is my favourite place in the world.

The children are utterly forbidden from bickering in it, as it is my sanctuary, my joy, my happy place.  So it's nice to see it full of stuff growing.

However.

I suspect that the man who wrote Dig On For Victory has shuffled off this mortal coil, m'loves, but I am tempted to trace his descendants and give one of them a bop on the snout.  All this successional sowing, and starting stuff early on in the greenhouse is well and good, but it doesn’t half leave you with a burgeoning plethora of plantlets which are too big to stay in their little newspaper pots, and insufficiently frost hardy to risk planting out.  To be fair to the man, when he wrote his book in the 1940s, I don't suppose that he was anticipating the mid-summer-style March of 2012, but I’m still a bit cross.  I hold my hands up, I do – I should have thought it through, but where’s the fun in that?

Good plan for lettuce growing - old length of guttering salvaged from pre-fire greenhouse, with a pot at each end to stop the soil dribbling out, but allow for drainage - seems to be working

Anyway, all this plentitude has resulted in my having to perform an undesirable task which I have never before had to resort to in my (minimal) veg gardening career – Potting On.  Sure, tomatoes, cucumbers, chillis and all the other things which stay in the greenhouse need to be moved to a bigger pot at some point, but I’ve always planted everything else a bit later, hardened it off for a week or so and then planted straight out – that’s the beauty of the little newspaper pots, y’see – you can just plant them straight in the ground. 

Broad beans, peas and mangetouts, being hardened orf

I DID have stacks and stacks of old plastic pots under the staging in the old greenhouse, but of course, they melted in the conflagration, so I was down to 20 or so.  Having already had to pot on the gitting tomatoes as I messed up my tomato hammock order by not noticing how many were in my basket, over-ordering, having to ring to reduce the number and find out three days later that they'd actually just cancelled the order not amended it, and then, once the hammocks had arrived and the first had been constructed, realized that last year’s growbags which I’d planned to put in them are easily twice the size of the hammocks and – bloody HELL – lost in clauses again – ugh – anyway – what with one thing and another, I had already had to pot on 14 tomatoes because the growbags – oh, you get the idea!  Anyway, I'd run out of my small remaining stock of pots rescued from the jaws of the hairy assistant.

So, on Tuesday I had to beg some old pots off my dear friend R.  After an emergency DASH to her house (which included a long lazy coffee and a chat while gazing ruminatively at her veg patch and eating Toffee House Fudge until we felt sick) and a DASH back armed with about 30 recycled plastic pots, I potted on seven butternut squash, 10 cayenne peppers, 12 courgettes and 16 runners (which are nearly a foot tall and can’t go out for at least a month – probably a bit longer!  Gaaaah!).

And so today finds me sat here in the greenhouse talking to you, surrounded by MUCH happier vegetable-producing machines (and the essential presence of my sidekick, His Royal Hairiness), with a lot of space on the staging and a lot of empty seed trays whispering “fill me, fiiiillllll me!”.  Apparently, I do not learn from my mistakes, as I am now mentally flicking through my seed store, jusssst out of the corner of my eye, you understand, and wondering what to plant next.  Oh, alRIGHT!  I admit it.  I have already made a tray’s worth of newspaper pots to fill – satisfied!?  But I am, at least, going back to my faithful friend, Mr Hessayon, and his Vegetable and Herb Expert.  He has never failed me yet.