RHS qualified

Bit of a belated post with the result of my RHS Level 2 Certificate in Horticulture (I actually received it in early May) but I passed - with commendation! I was really pleased and am now planning to move on to Level 3 in September.

planting out the tomatoes

So, only a couple of weeks after the great tomato giveaway, I'm finally ready to put the best of the bunch into their final growing positions in the greenhouse. My greenhouse is quite teeny but I cram as much in as will fit but still allow me to access everything for watering. And my techniques and methods have been honed and tweaked over the last few years until I have what works best for me.


Tomatoes really benefit from extra root depth so I've cut the bottom off a couple of large plastic plant pots to provide this. It's basically the same as those expensive 'tomato grow pots' you'll find for sale in the garden centre - so money saving and repurposing all in one. I also tend to put the growbag on its side to maximise the depth of compost rather than using them flat on the floor.


I cut a hole in the growbag the same size as the interior circumference of the bottomless pot and then push the pot into this to about a 1 inch depth. Then I pot up the tomato in the usual fashion. I find that 3 tomato plants per growbag works well - anymore than that and I get lost in a jungle of foliage.


In February I sowed some self-saved tagete seeds and the seedlings of these are planted into small holes at the front of the bag in an attempt to ward off the whitefly. Whether it actually works or not is a mystery to me. My toms haven't suffered from whitefly, but as someone on a gardening forum recently commented, they haven't suffered with tigers either, so maybe it works on them as well...

Bottletop drippers are positioned at the back of the growbag, leaning up against the greenhouse wall so I don't need to hand water the plants every day (I'm a bit forgetful on that front if the truth be told).Then I pour myself a generous Pimms and sit back and wait for the harvest.

Featured on Fennel and Fern

Yay! A blog post I submitted to the lovely Fennel and Fern site has been chosen to feature on their front page. I've been skulking around anonymously on the site for a while, reading articles and looking at their lovely photos - and now I'm on it myself. Big smiles! Click here to read it.

Easter stocktake

Each year in mid-April is usually a good time to take a look at what you've got in the ground and compare that with your planting plan. It will highlight if you have extra room you weren't expecting - something has failed at seedling stage, or you simply forgot to sow at the right time - and will also be a good check to see if you have room for the rest of your planned planting.

In the suburban veg plot, the broad beans have grown well since their re-sowing in February and are flowering well. Among them are nasturtiums which I hope will be more attractive to the blackfly than the beans themselves.


I've already started harvesting radishes and the looseleaf salad - and as last year, it's just fantastic. Crisp, fresh and tasty leaves from plot to plate in 2 minutes. You just can't get better than that.
The celeriac, carrots, beetroot and spinach are filling one raised bed and the butternut squash, miniature pumpkins and courgettes are also out in the ground.
On the herbage front, the chives and sage are in flower and the mint is flourishing. Just in time for Pimms season!!

I shot the chicken, but I didn't shoot the deputy

Don't worry - she's actually just sunbathing.

The great tomato giveaway

It was when I fell over the tomatoes for the 15th time that I got really annoyed. They were in a seed tray on the floor of the greenhouse - 6 plants each in a 5 inch pot - I should have realised they would impair my movements given that my greenhouse is about the size of your average corner bath (you know, one of those 80s avocado numbers - surely my parents weren't the only ones committing offences against interior design thirty years ago?). So I picked up the tray to move it somewhere more suitable. And that's when the scales fell from my eyes and I saw for the first time the reality of the situation I found myself in.
I think most of us sow more seeds than we need - to allow for germination failure - then the general advice is to select the strongest ones and thin out the weaklings and throw them away. I would estimate that I had an average germination rate of 80% across the 4 tomato varieties I sowed. And that's where problem started. I just can't throw plants away! First I'm waiting to see if the smaller ones are suddenly going to overtake those that looked strongest in the first place. So I prick them all out - just to give them all an equal chance. Weeks later, they're all growing on strongly and I keep potting them on - in newly bought compost and watering them all with precious rainwater from my water butts. I spend weeks in March carrying them all out to the greenhouse each morning and carrying them back indoors each night to tuck them up. Through April I see them flourishing in the sun and the bigger they get the more I can't bring myself to throw them on the compost heap.
So this emotional attachment has finally culminated in a veritable jungle of plants in a very compact greenhouse. And this is not just a case of a 'few' too many plants, oh no, this is proper obsessive. Each summer I have space in my greenhouse for a total of 5 tomato plants, 6 if I'm not growing melons as well (that's another post altogether). Guess how many tomato plants I have - that's right, 42. And it's not just tomatoes, I'm the same with peppers and chillies. Once the tomato plants are placed in grow bags on my greenhouse floor, I have space on the staging for 8-10 pots, depending on the pot size. So why on earth wouldn't I raise 59, yes, you read that right, 59 chilli plants. And still yesterday, I found myself potting some of them on again as they'd outgrown their pots.
This just can't carry on, it is, as they say untenable, unsustainable and just plain impossible. I'm going to ruthlessly pick out the strongest ones to keep and the rest are going on freecycle. And once they're gone, I'll see what else I can giveaway.

A visit to Van Gogh country?

My sister-in-law will never forgive me if she ever sees this. We were visiting her for a few days last week and as ever, she and her boyfriend generously gave up their bedroom for us and themselves slept on a sofa bed in a very crowded home office. And I thank her by posting a photo of her garden on my blog. You'll have realised by now that she's not a garden person.
I think if you squint a bit, it could be a field of Van Gogh sunflowers that are far far away.