Monday 19 March 2018

under glass

There is real warmth in the sun by now, although today's brisk north-easterly made it feel perishingly cold outside.  I went to check the greenhouse and conservatory, and found I needed to do a substantial amount of watering.  You'd have thought that with the snow and the cold not much would have happened out there, unless anything else died of cold.  The forecast for the next week is for it to remain above freezing, and after that we will be so close to April that I hope I won't need to run the heaters any more.  Glass is capable of keeping off a normal light night frost, as long as things get the chance to warm up again in the daytime.  It is better then polythene in this respect.

I turfed the pots of Solidago back out of the greenhouse, so that I had somewhere to put my feet, but left the hyacinths until tomorrow.  They are just opening, and it seemed a pity to subject their flowers to the icy blast when it's soon due to be so much warmer.  After all, flowering is the only interesting thing that hyacinths do.  It's not as though there was lovely autumn foliage or anything else to look forward to.  In the meantime they are making the greenhouse smell rather nice.  This year's variety is 'Splendid Cornelia', an unusual shade of pale purple that has become bang on-trend since I ordered the bulbs.  They were not my first choice.  I think I originally opted for 'City of Bradford' but the bulb merchant contacted me to warn that the quality of the bulbs their supplier had sent them was so poor they had sent the whole lot back.  They are planted in quincunx formation, five to a pot, and in one pot one of the five has irritatingly failed to emerge.

The tomato seedlings were looking good, the second sowing emerging and the seedlings from the first sowing a healthy colour and reasonably sturdy.  One hopeful loop of stem was just breaking the surface of the compost of my pot of Geranium nodosum.  With any luck that was merely the first sign of life and I will get more than one plant.  I tested the weight of the pots of seeds carefully, to see if any needed watering, and mopped the condensation from the floor of the heated propagator.

I'm afraid the Tibouchina has had it.  I bought it at a Plant Heritage meeting a few years back, and it made it though the first winter in the conservatory but struggled with the second, suffering major dieback.  I chopped it down hard, and it was beginning to respond but now the new growth is limp and pale fawn coloured, when it is supposed to be evergreen.  There have never been any more on the Plant Heritage stall from where that one came from, but I suppose I could buy one commercially.  It has large, exotic, purple flowers, when it is alive and well, and the Systems Administator liked it.

Last year's Arctotis don't look great either, despite my careful efforts to water them on the Goldilocks principal, not too much but not too little.  Only one of last autumn's cuttings struck, and that was pink and not the burnt orange that I particularly liked.  I am waiting to see if they will show signs of sprouting from the base now the temperature's rising inside the greenhouse.  Otherwise do I succumb to the temptation of Sarah Raven's Dark Rich Arctotis Collection?  A catalogue arrived in the post the other day, so I am hanging on to it in case I want to use the twenty per cent off voucher.  Crocus are my new gardening friends, since I subscribed to their marketing email list to qualify for a discount on my order, and keep sending me cheery messages about the things I ought to be doing (or buying).  I have redirected them to the folder named Marketing, which I check sometimes in case there are any useful offers, without feeling the need to read all the contents in detail.

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