The days are short and gloomy, and the greenhouse is packed with plants that are just huddled and sitting out the winter, passing time, nothing much doing. There is a time for everything and now is for exactly this sort of plant limbo, but…but…us gardeners do get itchy green fingers even in these darkened moments, […]
There can now be no pretence that anything else is going to ripen in the greenhouse this year. A greenhouse can do a lot but the clocks have changed, the dark is creeping in, and the weather has cooled, and we have to give up thinking that those final rays of low sunlight might turn […]
It is annoying when one of your great greenhouse successes of the year is not one you planted… or even particularly wanted, but so it has proved this year. Call me a party pooper but I am not a big fan of a giant pumpkin. I love Hallowe’en and I love the pumpkin’s role in […]
It has been a long, slow and mostly pretty cool summer in the greenhouse. Social media loves to throw old triumphs from past years at us, and so I am fully aware of how smug I have been about summer tomatoes in other years, and how pitifully late my tomatoes are this year. It feels […]
I have bought a brand new, long-hankered-after plant this summer that might just make my greenhouse a little less full to bursting this winter: a ‘semponium’. I have long loved Aeoniums – beautiful succulents the most well known of which is ‘Zwartkopf’, which has almost black rosettes of leaves on sinuous stems. I think I […]
It was such a slow spring for the vegetable plants that I started in the greenhouse this year, but harvest time has finally begun! There are now finally enough crops coming to make a good salad each day – and that will do for now. The spring started off so very wet that in truth […]
The greenhouse has now been planted up with tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergines and some basil, and the growing year is underway. I want to say ‘finally’ – it is finally underway. It all happened quite late this year – that long, cold, wet spring really didn’t lend itself to early sowings and plantings, even under glass, […]
Even in the shelter of the greenhouse it has been a cold, slow start to the spring this year – the endless rain in my part of the country has made getting outdoors a chore, at least up until very recently, and so I haven’t done as much sowing as I had planned to, and […]
I have some small lettuce seedlings that I started in the greenhouse and it is time to plant them out and get some summer salads going. The weather has been so very wet here in the southwest of England this spring that the garden is well behind, and the only work that has really occurred […]
One of the plants I have kept in the greenhouse all winter is wasabi. Wasabi is native to Japan and in the wild it grows in near woodland streams, on mountains, and so at high altitude. All of this works in our favour when growing it in the UK. Japan and the UK are not […]
One of the exciting things that happens this month in my greenhouse is the blossoming of the nectarine. It always feels too early, blossoming while it feels so wintery out there, and is one of the first bits of blossom in my garden. It is a wonderful harbinger of spring. My ‘tree’ is actually a […]
The weather may be cold and grim and the days short and unpromising, but a great use for the greenhouse in these colder months is to use it to bring on some early spring flowers. They bring with them that whisper of warmer, lighter, more hopeful days to come, and even the act of planting […]
