Green Fingers III

The problem with having so much hardware introduced to the garden it’s easy to forget it’s a place for plants.

The fashion - about twenty years ago - for garden decking, glass and metal constructions and tv screens in a garden, the outside room, always seemed to me to be more about stone, pebbles, cement, sawing and hammering than growing and nurturing.

In our garden, by February this year, we had a new leaky greenhouse, an insulated almost perfect shed, bags of gravel, sand and cement and decorative bark, raised beds on legs, step ladders, tarpaulin and tins of paint. There was a point at which I wondered whether any growing would ever actually take place.

Even my hard-working builder friend,D, said the top garden looked like a building site. Bags of rubble and clag were filling the garage, while I awaited a slot at the corporation tip aka the city recycling site. Spare cement was used to make small walls and boundaries from a few red bricks we had lying around. The bonfire- cum-enriched veggie plot was no more - its space taken by the new shed. And the new raised beds were ready for fresh compost. 

So my green fingers turned black and I improved the soil too. Gotta get down and dirty!

But what to do about the condensation in the greenhouse? Polycarbonate sheets seemed to be the answer: double-glazing for the greenhouse. We looked at various websites; remember we no longer have a Homebase or a local DIY store. The nearest B&Q store is in Bristol but we do have a Screwfix. In the end I ordered £200 worth of polycarbonate sheets to be collected. This cost on top of the initial outlay for the greenhouse was leading me to think an expensive one might have been more economical in the end. However it was a perfect size for the space we had. And, days later, after my friend, D, had created a double-glazed effect using poly sheets,beading, nails and more and more silicon, the transformation was truly remarkable. Gone were the grey, fogged, wet windows. We had a working, unheated greenhouse.

Then the shelves went in. Even more exciting was getting the tumbler compost maker. A neighbour saved me £100 by donating his to me. He had cleaned it out and it fitted neatly next to the new shed. I was finally beginning to think of growing rather than building. And it was still only February. And to add to my gratitude another neighbour helped D to carry my pine table into the shed for me. 

A favourite uncle of mine had given me the money for the pine table when we got married 40 years ago. We also purchased a matching cabinet with shelves. They were among our first purchases when we moved into our new home. We hardly needed to buy anything, however, as Richard’s mother chose to go into a nursing home at the same time and we inherited her dresser, three piece suite, desk, double bed and occasional tables. My aunt gave us a canteen of silver and we had many chairs, bookshelves, cooking pots and pans of our own plus my mother-in-law’s kitchen ware. 

The pine table, then, meant a lot to me. But we have had it outside, wrapped in bubble-wrap and many layers of tarpaulins, for more years than was good for it as oak replaced pine in our dining room. But the pine table was a poor thing: Its legs were bowed, the drawer no longer fitted, the table top was damp and needed sandpapering but nevertheless it worked as a table. Others would have taken it to a tip. I had it moved into the new shed. Sheltered housing for its old age. 

Come mid-March, my birthday, the flower beds were looking colourful and my thoughts turned to vegetables. I had half-heartedly planted cabbages which, in the main, had unsuccessfully overwintered. But I left four of them to grow on and covered them with mesh. 

It was high time for using some of my freshly-made compost on the veggie beds. It took three digs to work them as every time I raked them and prepped them another load of grit was put on top; so much work was still going on in the garden with fewer places to deposit excess soil. After the third attempt I covered them with tarpaulins … ‘verboten’.

I was itching to sow beans, peas, leeks and spinach, my usual fare. But the thermometer said ‘no’. More of that next time: my adventures in heating a greenhouse…