in the greenhouse

The Met Office couldn't make their minds up about today's weather.  Yesterday they were forecasting rain on Tuesday morning for our area with ninety per cent probability, then by this morning it had dropped back to ten per cent chance.  I could see the radiating circles of light rain falling on the pond as I stood at the kitchen sink, and decided to spend the morning doing a stint in the greenhouse, then it could rain or not as it pleased without disturbing me.

I have plenty of Eccremocarpus scaber seedlings, more than I could possibly use.  This is a tender, rapid climber that produces little bell shaped flowers in vivid shades of red, orange, coral pink or white (not all on the same plant).  I plan to send some scrambling among the dahlias, but know from past attempts to raise it from seed that the young plants rapidly grow into each other and seize on to their neighbours for grim death, so I moved the seedlings straight into three inch pots, so that I'd have some scope to space them out as they grew.  I am going to run out of space in the greenhouse, I can see this now.  I was left with half a pot of seedlings undisturbed, and slipped their root ball back into a spare pot and filled the empty half with compost for now.  They'll soon be too enmeshed to prick out, but just for a day or two they can act as an insurance policy in case the ones I pricked out don't take.

I don't like the look of the current bag of B&Q compost.  Their multi-purpose is normally good, besides being cheaper than many of the branded composts, but this bag seems to contain too much insufficiently composted ground wood.  I could see a fine mesh of fungus growing through the contents of the bag.  If it is purely a decay fungus then it shouldn't hurt living plants, but I wasn't keen on entrusting my replacement packet of gazania seeds to it.  That's the trouble with buying compost.  A given make may review well, or you may have a good experience with it, then the next time you buy the same thing what you find in the bag may be quite different.

A heresy.  I am pretty ecologically minded.  I don't fly, and am pretty sure my carbon footprint is a lot lower than Prince Charles'.  But I do resent not being allowed to buy decent compost, containing an element of peat if that's what it takes to make a tolerable growing medium, for as long as the Irish go on shovelling peat into power stations.  When we stop burning peat in industrial quantities I'll feel more guilty about the relatively tiny amounts used by home gardeners.  Until then, not so much.

I sowed some sunflowers, two to a deep three inch pot as a compromise between not wasting growing space and not wasting seeds, though the seeds came as freebies with magazines.  I thought they were big and tough enough to cope with the fungus ridden compost.  If both germinate I'll carefully separate them out.  Large seeds like sunflowers don't make the best free gifts to package up with magazines sent through the post, as they tend to get crushed in transit, and one of my packets of 18 FREE seeds worth £2.89 or whatever it was only actually contained twelve usable ones.  And one packet that said 'Red Sun' on the printed outer packet was labelled 'Velvet Queen' on the inner foil.  It doesn't really matter, as long as I get some dark red and some yellow.  Last year I never got round to sowing any, but a few self-sown volunteers meant it wasn't a total sunflower wipe-out.

After lunch I let the chickens out for a run, because they were grizzling so loudly, but by teatime it began to rain.  Quite hard, and by then I'd mislaid two hens.  Three were with me in the long bed, one was last seen standing shrieking outside the hen house, and the fifth I'd totally lost track of.  I sat in the porch with a cup of tea, hoping they'd go in soon, and to my relief they did.  It stopped raining, but by then I'd decided to call it a day on the gardening front.   Everything was wet, and the air was cold.