When everyone else is sowing sweet peas in their greenhouses and cold frames in autumn, I have learnt to hold my nerve and bide my time. I know that an autumn sowing is the accepted way, but it has never really worked for me. Perhaps because my greenhouse is not sited in the ideal sunny […]

There is almost no month in the year when you can’t be sowing something in the greenhouse, if you really put your mind to it. As if to prove this I have found myself heading down the garden these last dreary days with a packet of onion seed, just like the monster veg growers. The […]

The greenhouse is relatively bereft of promising young shoots now, in this chilly November. But the work it did in spring – sheltering promising young shoots from the vagaries – is still being felt in the kitchen, and will be for some time to come. I sowed three types of winter squash, ‘Uchiki Kuri’, the […]

Some allotment friends were talking to me the other day about growing wedding flowers for a friend, in their greenhouse and on their plot. My first question was the date – around midsummer, they said. My second, rapidly, worriedly: have you already sown? No. I tried not to instil panic, but one thing I do […]

I want to make good use of the greenhouse over winter and to that end I have decided to rescue some herbs from the slow autumn slump. Right now all of my herbs are looking pretty good, and it is easy to be fooled into imagining this will go on, particularly when the September days […]

Perhaps my favourite greenhouse job of the year is releasing the contents of my mini greenhouse into the wider garden. Fly, my pretties, fly! The mini greenhouse receives a tiny bit of heat through the winter, just a low constant from a propagating mat, and this allows me to overwinter some of my favourite plants: […]