Sunday 21 March 2010

Crunch Point

My windowsills are now groaning under the weight of seedlings reaching for the light and I'm starting to feel like I'm looking at the world through a pair of green-tinted spectacles. Obviously space is limited (I don't live in a giant greenhouse, nor do I have a house with full plate-glass shop windows). So an interesting hierarchy of favouritism is developing. Tomatoes aubergines & chillies are all top dog in my house - right there living it up on the window sills. But I foolishly also sowed a few squashes & pumpkins - take a quiet moment to watch these, and they grow right in front of your eyes like stop-animation of the kind you see on a nature programme. Oh Lordy, I am undone.


I confess, the pansies (first time I've ever grown these from seed - previous years I've always bought these each spring as plug plants) are probably furthest from a window - indeed, they're currently sitting on a kitchen work surface in front of the boiler. These are (oh, how embarrassing to admit this) more leggy than Elle Mcpherson (or some other 6ft giantess 1980s supermodel type with pins insured for a million dollars). If my pansies were people they would look like this.

How will these survive? As soon as they go outside, one gentle hint of a breeze and they'll be over like a teen that's had one too many alchopops - stems snapped & dead as a dodo.

What to do?

Methinks a re-shuffling is in order. A trip to the pound shop is to be had on Monday, for half a dozen nasty plastic 12" pots. Squashes are going to have to take their chances down at the allotment shed. I call it a shed. Actually, it's more of a summer house affair with plenty of windows, frequently used as target-practice by the local yoofs roaming the allotments on a Saturday night (good grief - is that really the best idea they can come up with to entertain themselves?). Glass windows are pane-by-pane being replaced with perspex. Hopefully, before the final piece of glass is broken whatever the yoofs are lobbing at my windows will bounce off the perspex and donk them right back. Right back atcha.

4 comments:

  1. Hi there, thanks for following my blog, I hope it helps in some way with your new venture of Allotmenteering and blogging.
    Good luck with both, I don't know what I would do without mine. I hope you don't regret sowing the squashes & pumpkins so early. It's OK if you have somewhere to put them before planting out after the frosts as they get big quite quickly. Have you got a cold frame ?

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  2. So pleased to have found your blog! And drawings from time to time too!

    I'm quite busy and read too many blogs so I can't promise necessarily to visit often but I'll drop by to catch up from time to time.

    Meanwhile . . . another blogger with drawings. Hurray!

    Thank you for becoming a follower of Esther's Boring Garden Blog.

    Esther Montgomery

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  3. I've got my squashes on big pots in the shed now (unfortunately, as I've now discovered, that leaves me nowhere to hide when it's raining). But I have tons of manure now, so may get a hot-bed going. But equally if I feel I;ve made a mistake in sowing too early I will have no qualms about pulling up what I've got and starting over....

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  4. You have a lovely shiny new blog here.

    I totally understand about space. My windowsill is burgeoning too, and i have so much to sow still.

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