Tucked into the corner of my cold greenhouse last winter, my pelargoniums looked at best unassuming, at worst half dead. But the greenhouse actually gave them exactly what they needed, keeping them alive for this precise moment in the year, for high summer, when they burst into glorious flower. I have always loved pelargoniums (often […]
Throughout winter my greenhouse played host to many miserable looking specimens, semi-hibernating through the coldest months, but there was one that I am always particularly delighted to see leap back into life come spring. Bright and citrusy, lemon verbena provides perhaps the best scent in the garden – rub the leaves and bring your fingers […]
The greenhouse has been pressed into unexpected service this week, as the annual houseplant holiday has hit a bit of a snag. Every winter my houseplants struggle with the low light and the dry centrally heated air, and by late spring they are look wan and drawn. And so every summer, when the weather turns […]
The greenhouse can do many wonderful things, particularly at this time of year, but one of the things it cannot do is make up for me having bought tomato plants too early. I know this lesson. I learned it many years ago, or at least I should have. Tomatoes grow fast, and as they do […]
One of the delights of this moment of the year in the greenhouse is my dwarf nectarine, in a pot on the sunniest side. It is true that spring is starting to show itself elsewhere: I have a collection of pots and plugs of seed compost on the greenhouse bench that are showing little signs […]
From March onwards the greenhouse will start to fill up, but currently it is still and quiet and pretty empty in mine. There is time to make one last winter use of it, before the spring rush begins, and force some lily-of-the-valley pips. This is something I love to do every few years. The greenhouse […]
I love this stage of the greenhouse gardening year. Not, necessarily, because I am much enjoying being in the greenhouse right now, although I will admit that I love to be in there tending to the few overwintering seedling on the odd sunny day, the glass magnifying the heat and warming my back. But let’s […]
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 […]
