The greenhouse is looking surprisingly better than it might have done. As I have previously confessed, due to a basic design error (standing the greenhouse on one corner of a large continuous concrete raft), as soon as we get any appreciable amount of rain, water runs across the floor. The greenhouse in winter is thus apt to be damp, even though the roof doesn't leak very much, and damp is the enemy of overwintering plants. The pots of geraniums were looking remarkably buoyant, all things considered, and I have to conclude that while damp is bad, weeks of barely above freezing cold weather is even worse.
The mice have been active again, though, after a quiet period when I thought I'd seen them off. Confession: I use rat and mouse poison under glass. I worry about using rodenticides, since they have been implicated in breeding failure in barn owls. I foresee it is only a matter of time before I feel I can't use them, or else they are withdrawn from sale for domestic use. On the other hand, I don't suppose the mice (or voles, or whatever they are) that cause havoc in my greenhouse are going to travel very far afterwards, and I don't honestly believe that the local tawnies, let alone barn owls, hunt for food on the concrete next to our drive. Meadow, probably, back garden possibly, but front garden, with all the gravel, and the parked vehicles, and general urban crowdedness of it all?
Most of the pots of alliums seem to have survived. There was some surface scuffling, but it looks as though mice don't eat the bulbs. Perhaps they are too onion flavoured. Past experience at home, and observation at the plant centre, has taught me that Allium siculum is sensitive to over watering, and can easily rot in a pot. Sometimes nothing comes up at all, and when you investigate the compost you find merely a mush, or a few tiny offsets around the remains of the basal plate, which will take at least a year to reach flowering size. Alternatively the leaves grow a few inches tall, then keel over, for the same reason. I have tried to be very stingy watering the pots of A. siculum, and 'Ivory Queen', and it looks as though so far I am on track to have nice living plants to place out in the borders.
I start a lot of bulbs in pots nowadays, simply because at bulb planting time in the autumn I can't see what's already growing in the beds. Then there are the pots I'm growing for display. Several of the Whichford basketweave pots already have the snouts of tulips showing above the compost. I found space for the hyacinth pots under the bench inside the greenhouse, after the year when the bulbs rotted, left outside, and the compost in those was heaved up into mounds and hollows, I'm not sure how much by the energies of the emerging leaves pushing through compost which had caked, or whether the mice have been investigating them too. I can probably risk bringing them out fairly soon, now that they have roots to take up water and are at less risk of rotting, and in more need of light.
I don't know how many of the primroses I divided last year have survived. I split a pot of the little purple flowered 'Wanda' to get the most part of two dozen plants, a slightly forlorn hope since the birds here (or mice) seem to like to eat the flowers of 'Wanda' above any other primrose. I've been very cautious about letting the compost in the primrose pots sit wet during the winter, and it's now a case of wait-and-see as to how many pots send up central tufts of new leaves as spring arrives, and how many have quietly died, either rotted, or died of drought if I was over-cautious with the watering. I don't think Primula poissonii responded at all well to being split. That's just a feeling. The other plant I bought one of and broke into pieces was the pink, eastern European form of the UK native P. vulgaris. That should have worked, theoretically.
The best value bulbs have to be the six small hybrid cyclamen that have been blooming all winter on the shelf in the porch. I got them in a polystyrene multipack in B&Q for the princely sum of three pounds or thereabouts, and potted them individually into small identical terracotta pots. Whichford describe them as auricula pots, though they are not honestly as nice as the old fashioned pots the specialist auricula growers use at Chelsea, having thicker walls, curved sides and a lip, whereas the classic auricula pot is straight sided and rimless. However, they are not bad little pots, and the row of six white flowered plants, all alike in their matching pots lined up along the shelf, makes a stronger design statement than I'd have achieved messing around with one of this and three of that. The label was rather vague about the identity of the cyclamen, and I suspect they will not be hardy planted out in the garden, though I'll probably try them under the shelter of the gean. Even if they don't last beyond this winter I can scarcely say I haven't had my money's worth.
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