It is time for me to start thinking about sowing winter herbs for the glasshouse. Parsley has slowly crept into my life in a big way. It used to be a herb I shunned – a white parsley sauce has a sort of bland, milky, mildly green flavour that I have never got on with. […]
Always site your glasshouse in your sunniest spot, goes the gardening wisdom, and quite rightly too. There is little point going to all the trouble of buying and erecting a structure perfectly designed to capture every ray of sunlight and drop of warmth if you then plonk it in the lee of a building or […]
The tomatoes that started in the greenhouse need planting out now – a little late but life and half term had their own ideas, so a couple of weeks ago I potted them up into big pots to keep them ticking over, and now is the moment to get these big brutes into the polytunnel. […]
The greenhouse’s most bonny specimens at the moment are beans, almost bursting out of their pots and modules desperate to get out into the ground. And it won’t be long. I have a few types on the go. Most shamefully I have broad beans, which is an admission that all of those I sowed in […]
The strong urge to push on with the growing year only increases if you have a greenhouse at your disposal: surely – we think – I can get everything going nice and early and be ahead of the game? Be harvesting when everyone else is just planting out? Have ripe tomatoes in June? We might […]
If you have made good use of your greenhouse for starting off winter vegetables last spring and summer you will be feeling pretty smug about the so-called veg crisis right now. Even me saying ‘so called’ is pretty smug, but as all good gardeners know, this is not really a veg crisis at all but […]
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 […]
Little by little the greenhouse plants that have been sewn, potted on and juggled about for the last couple of months are finding their way outside. First they have to look sturdy and healthy, and to have produced a few leaves, then they get a week on the back steps – a gentle sunny and […]
