tomato plants | Green Writing Room

Now that the DIY on our two rotten windowsills, after much resin filler and elbow-grease, is nearing completion, I can concentrate on my writing…

Except that last year my new greenhouse was a pitiful desert. All I managed to grow were three sweet peppers (on one plant). Everything else got fried or damped off as I was ignorant about managing the ventilation. So this spring, I sowed madly… perhaps a little too madly. I was miffed when tomatoes failed to germinate, so I sowed more. Various seedlings got potted on and moved into the garden and veg plot, but new tomato seedlings – unlabelled – kept popping up in unlikely places.

Apart from three pepper plants, tomatoes now rule the greenhouse and my life. There are more than 34 plants. The greenhouse ones need constant water, and ventilation and they all need non-stop disbudding (a skill I have acquired late in life, but will lead, I am assured, to more tomatoes and less greenery).

And the hosta, of course, just keeps on growing. I am still writing, and I have exciting news on the POW letters book front, but I will wait for tangible confirmation before sharing it.

This was going to be a boring post about TAX and ebooks, but I’ll save that until I have made a call to the US tax authorities.

In April I was putting up photos of my wonderful new greenhouse. Soon after this I started planting seeds like fury. I decided to try and use up all my old seeds (some very ancient indeed). After an anxious week or so a few little seedlings made an appearance in a couple of trays, but I didn’t really know when to take the lids of the propagators and one lot damped off. The others died on the very hot day we went into town forgetting to open the greenhouse ventilators. Absolutely nothing appeared in the other trays.

I tried again with fresher seed but had similar results. So my total greenhouse haul this year so far is four weeds,

the sweet pepper a friend gave me,

and behind that one of the two tomatoes I managed to grow, the other is in the vegetable patch. I did manage to grow a pot full of purple sprouting broccoli and that is in the veg bed along with some direct sown leeks, carrots etc, but still, it’s embarrassing.

The good thing about gardens is that there is always another season and something else to admire. I rather like this last glimpse of the sun. The lilies are trying to make up for other failures,