warmer weather beckons

After seeing the weather forecast for the rest of the week I thought it was time to get the shading paint on to the greenhouse.  Damping down the floor will get you so far, but shade is more reliable, and it's a sad thing to go out for the day and come home to trays of shrivelled and dessicated seedlings.

Years ago I used to buy an expensive high tech paint that was supposed to go transparent when it rained, and cloudy again when the sun shone.  The idea was that the plants received maximum light on dull days without cooking on hot ones.  It was frankly not worth the price or the hassle, and nowadays I use a basic titanium dioxide based powder, a couple of sachets mixed up in an old fertiliser bucket in half a litre of water and applied with a long handled decorator's roller.

High status greenhouse management it is not.  The roller gives a thick enough covering to do the job, but the result is uneven, and you can see the greyish stains on the wood where I spilled over the glazing bars.  It is a world away from the pristine greenhouses on display at Chelsea or advertised in the glossy magazines.  There again, it is a working plant factory, and I'm not sure how well some of the glamorous but unshaded greenhouses would perform in practice.  One year I copied an idea from a gardening TV programme (I think Monty Don was the culprit, though he is normally pretty reliable) and threw the shading paint over the greenhouse roof, but besides being very wasteful of paint the end result looked as though an entire flock of seagulls had catastrophically crapped on it.

Space inside is very, very tight and I am going to have to evict anything reasonably tough that's still rooting in to the cold frames, to make space for the next round of pricking out.  I might have to sow some broad beans in pots, as there is still not a single one emerging in the veg patch.  How can broad beans not germinate?  They are huge great seeds, supposed to be tough as old boots and idiot proof.

The Systems Administrator, who has been waiting for days for the wind to go round to the east to have a bonfire, seized the moment late this afternoon and had one, and as promised the enormous heap of brambles and woody waste waiting to be burned vanished in scarcely any time at all.  I'm glad it's gone, as there is still plenty to come down from the meadow and it makes space for more. If the Met Office are right about it being a hot summer (and I'm not holding my breath) then we need to stay up to date with bonfires, before everything gets so hot and dry that it isn't safe to have another until the autumn.