By mid-May this year I had joined an allotment growers group on facebook. Almost everyone was complaining that it was too cold and wet for seeds to germinate and many were growing them on windowsills. But we have very narrow window sills in our house. And for the first time I have a greenhouse, which I preferred to use, to get the sowing season started.
It became very frustrating to still see the thermometer register no more than 45 deg F. I knew most French beans need 50deg F for germination. I had a few weeks in hand but I was itching to get growing.
On one of the rare days in May when it was sunny and dry I decided to brighten up the shed and greenhouse. I matched Cuprinol wood stain shades with my bunting and bought a copy of Gill Heriz’s ‘A Woman’s Shed’. In it were glorious examples of sheds cum study rooms, garden rooms, work rooms, sun rooms and - simply - sheds. I found the design that most closely resembled my new ‘play pen’. It had access to water, electricity, a table and chairs, a cushion, a view, curtains (to match the cushions) and the inevitable kettle. The best one was built with decking and a sail for shade.
I set to with my seven metres of cloth. As I don’t have a sewing machine I trimmed the edges with pinking shears. There would be time in the winter to sit and make proper hems. I bought a simple piece of curtain wire and created a drape which matched the table cloth and spread a decorative swash along the shelf. No plants were growing there as yet.
I kept some cloth back as a cushion cover and painted the outside of the new shed and greenhouse in a lurid but fun array of lime green, flamingo pink, white and powder blue stripes. In the generally bleak month of May it was fun and lifted the spirit.
Meanwhile I had managed to pot up my begonia bulbs and in the unheated greenhouse they were just sprouting leaves. It was then I made a ridiculous discovery:
As I looked more closely at the plants on the shelves I saw that the thermometer which had never shifted from 45 deg F had a crack in it. It must have fallen and broken without my realising it. All this time it hadn’t even worked! The point at which I thought the meniscus on the mercury was stuck - at 45 degrees - the glass has smashed. No mercury could travel any further up the thermometer column. The column had been broken.
Since before lockdown, in some cases, we’d lost a few useful local shops. One of them was our DIY shop. It sold thermometers. But I didn’t want to waste any more time hunting down a DIY store. It was past mid-May already. The heat in the greenhouse was still palpable even though it was unseasonably cold outside. An online search had a 24 hour delivery slot. Next day my new thermometer arrived.
And, of course, with the thermometer safely installed inside the greenhouse, the mercury raced up the column. It was beyond 50 deg F. My French beans could germinate in those temperatures even if it was cooler overnight. Phew! What time had I wasted?
The small, grafted ‘sweet petite’ tomatoes had their place on the window sills indoors. But I set to in my new shed. I removed the table cloth and shelf cloth and armed with bags of seed compost I sowed trays of dwarf French bean and, new for me, about 30 climbing beans. For the latter I had been saving toilet roll inners. Some climbers were sown in seed trays, others in the toilet roll inners, simply as a comparative experiment. It was exciting!
By 19th May I had transplanted two tomato plants into large, individual pots and spaced them apart in one half of the greenhouse. And my trays of beans were germinating in their trays on shelves in the other half. All the wooden shelves were full of germinating beans and leeks and the petunias were in flower. In fact I had so many climbing beans I set some on the shelf under the large window in my new shed.
The temperatures inside the greenhouse held and 95% of the seedlings grew to four inches in height. By 1st June I enriched the prepped soil with more of my homemade compost and constructed wigwams from approximately 8 six foot canes. I was much relieved to have a working thermometer. The double-glazed polycarbonate ‘windows’ clearly kept in enough warmth so that my largely unheated greenhouse could sustain growth. We were in business!
But I’d say most garden plants and outdoor varieties were about a month behind. Would they all catch up in June? The weather was picking up.
Surely it was time for flowers to open and for the beans to go outside?
Yes. It was. But I spent the next few weeks removing bindweed that had flourished in all the rain. What a downer…And not just bindweed. Almost all the fuchsias, periwinkles and other leafy growth had exploded their waistlines during the wet weather. My neat spring garden looked unkempt and overrun. And a lot of it was simply excess growth. It had been too wet for anything more than intermittent, inconsequential gardening.
But June was a better month. At long last real gardening could begin.
And on to more home-growing adventures in my next post…
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