I have come to believe that the way to succeed with broad beans is to sow them every which way: autumn in the ground under cloches, winter in the greenhouse, spring direct and with no protection. Sow only in autumn and there will follow an extremely hard winter to knock the stuffing out of them. […]

Last winter was my most successful for getting slightly tender plants through the winter, and Im hoping to repeat my success. I laid a very low wattage propagation mat onto one of the shelves of the mini greenhouse and then snuggled all of the aeoniums, geraniums and succulents onto it. It seemed more efficient to […]

There’s been some surprising greenhouse forward planning around here. The chilli and pepper year is not yet quite done – some of those that were started in the greenhouse in early spring are still ripening – but despite this and in an almost unprecedented display of organisation I have started to think about next year’s […]

What started in the greenhouse in March is reaching fruition – very literally and bountifully – in the polytunnel now. So many of the months of growing Mediterranean vegetables are about hope, luck, graft and maintenance, but September is very definitely payback time. The plants are barely recognisable now as those tiny shivering things I […]

I am quite enjoying the sudden cool, and it is leading to a bit of a changing of the guard in the greenhouse. While this has until now been an incredible summer for anything that loves heat – tomatoes, chillies and even aubergines currently thrive in both greenhouse and polytunnel – there is one crop […]

A little while ago I wrote here about my hopes and plans for a cut flower border at the allotment. We were putting in the new polytunnel, and there was a bit of a lost space in front of it. I wanted that space – right at the front of the plot, on the path […]

I sowed the plants for the polytunnel before we started building the polytunnel. First things first, I started all those tender, warmth loving things by my feet in my office, cosied away in a heated propagator, and later moved them up onto the office windowsill and later still out into the greenhouse. There they patiently […]

One of my big hopes for this year is to have a fine cut flower patch. I want to be able to pick bunch after bunch of lovely flowers for myself, for birthday presents, for my mum when she’s looked after the kids. It’s an investment. A cut flower patch requires an awful lot of […]

The greenhouse is filling up alarmingly, and this is before I’ve started on the potting on. Sown seeds are a small, highly folded piece of paper and potting on is the unfolding of it. The volume doubles, then doubles again, then again. Pots balance upon pots, everything is crammed in and teetering, fighting for space, […]

Since I last wrote here my seed sowing has switched from smugly-ahead-of-time to oh-my-what-have-I-been-doing-with-my-time. Outdoors was so cold and slow back then, all of four weeks ago, and sowing time seemed endless. What happened? Now it’s all green shoots, pink blossom and blue skies and I have moved from leisured to frenzied. I am getting […]

I want to say: ‘It’s February, and it feels like spring is coming!’ but that would be a big, fat lie. Perhaps because we haven’t really had a proper chill all winter, perhaps because the weather is so relentlessly grey and dull, but I can’t quite get past that sense that winter might still come […]