Greenhouse story

I became the owner of a greenhouse this year for the first time in my life. I should have blogged about it in April and never got round to it, but better late than never.

For me, much of the appeal of greenhouses is the smell. And the memories evoked by it. The aroma of warm tomato foliage takes me straight back to my grandparents' garden in Colchester, Essex, where my grandfather (left) had a magnificent greenhouse in the middle of the back garden, a real focal point and centrepiece. He was a passionate gardener who grew flowers and vegetables and was particularly skilled at growing tomatoes. The garden was laid out in the classic English suburban style with what Alan Titchmarsh calls a "centrifugal lawn" with straight flower borders all around it (edged with geometric precision) and vegetables grown in a separate out-of-the-way area at the bottom end. As conventional as the design may have been, it was entirely his garden. He created it when he bought the house as a new-build in 1928 and nurtured it for the next 50 years.

I was 10 when he died but I never really knew him because he didn't talk much. He was a shy person and communicating with kids was not his forte, so I never really had conversations with him. I mainly knew him through his garden. I remember him showing me how to water plants, and how unimpressed I was when he told me to water the soil around the plants rather than just chucking it all over the foliage, which was a lot more fun. His garden was larger than the one we had at home and provided pleasures I'd never experienced before, such as sticking my hands into a big pile of grass cuttings on the compost heap and marvelling at the warmth inside, and the smell of the shed where his tools were kept, immaculately cleaned, oiled, sharpened and cared for (I wish I'd inherited that gene).

But the most intense memory is the smell of that greenhouse. It was an old-fashioned wooden one on a brick base, and it smelled of warm oiled wood mingled with the tang of tomato plants. I love that smell.

And now through the generosity of my parents I have one of these wonderful things in my own garden.

The site I chose for it was a neglected patch at the bottom of the garden. When I moved here in 2004 the garden was full of overgrown fruit trees and bushes which hadn't been pruned for years. I rejuvenated them (mostly successfully) but didn't know what to do with the piles of dead twigs, so they got dumped in a corner. And there they stayed until I got round to clearing them out and bringing the ground back into cultivation.

Clearing the site ...

And here it is.

I dithered for ages over where to go to get a greenhouse. There are lots of big stores around but I don't like the big chains ... I don't want to encourage them in their vile march towards total market domination. I don't shop at B&Q any more since they built a huge superstore a couple of miles outside town. I'm pissed off at the way these big corporations selfishly feck up the greenbelt with their loathsome warehouses and it's now impossible to get there without a car (the previous store was on the edge of town and within modest walking distance). I also find it a truly hateful shopping experience. The new superstore is vast and daunting and it's really hard to find anything. The staff are mostly hapless shelf-stackers unable to offer much help. Fellow shoppers are stressed out and bad-tempered, and the vast line of checkouts is like being shoved through a cattle market. Or a rugby scrum, when it's busy. What's really ironic is that the range of stuff they sell is not much bigger than it was at the previous shop, it's just bigger stocks of the same stuff, piled up higher on the shelves where you can't reach it anyway. I invariably find myself fighting back tears from the horribleness of it all. So I don't go any more.

I turned to the internet, and found what I wanted. Europa Manor make a 10' x 6' greenhouse which had exactly the spec I wanted and very good value for money. Even better, Europa Manor is a division of Eden Greenhouses which happens to be based within 5 miles of where I live. Buying local didn't make the delivery any cheaper but it did mean I got it in 5 days instead of the usual 2-5 weeks. But the difficult part was finding someone to put it up. Nobody advertises themselves as a putter-upper of greenhouses. If you look in the Yellow Pages you find dozens of companies wanting to flog you a greenhouse and install it at extra cost, but nobody offering to put one up which you've bought elsewhere. We tried several garden maintenance firms but it took a while to find one who would take it on, and it was pretty expensive. But we got there in the end.

The first residents moved in ... mostly tomatoes and peppers, plus a few peas waiting to be planted out. Yes that is a watering can you can see in the background with a bit of hosepipe running down from the guttering. It works a treat when there's overnight rain, it's just nicely filled up by the morning.

So I now have an enormous learning curve ahead of me. I already discovered this year the issue of grey mould. Yuk. That was partly because of something else I was experimenting with, which was allowing the tomatoes to grow freely. I had read that unpruned tomatoes are stronger and less vulnerable to blight. The greenhouse was probably not the best place to try it out, because by the beginning of August they were growing out through the roof and I could no longer get into the greenhouse at all. It also didn't seem to make any difference to the blight. All the greenhouse tomatoes were blighted, but it did spread a lot more slowly. And because the indoor fruits were about a month ahead of the outdoor ones, I got a much bigger and better crop from them anyway.

The frustration I have now, of course, is that the greenhouse is not big enough for more than eight or ten tomato plants, so I have to be ruthlessly selective with whatever I grow in there. Not easy when I have a backlog of Lycopersicon goodies I've collected in the last few years and some of my own breeding projects too.

Last dregs of blighted October tomatoes. The big ones are Copia, a variety I ordered from the US which didn't ripen fully in the climate here but fortunately still looks and tastes excellent when it's slightly unripe. The small round ones are my Marks & Sparks escapee, Green Tiger, which tastes fabulous and also takes this year's prize for blight-free abundance.

It was also a great pleasure to try growing chillis for the first time. One of the highlights was the bright yellow and curiously gnarled Lemon Drop, which is supposed to be lemon-flavoured but to me tasted more like peaches. Hot spicy peaches! It was a treat sliced up in a cheese sandwich and I'll definitely grow that one again.

Ripening Lemon Drop chillis. Hot, but in a fruity and flavoursome way rather than just blowing your head off, and better than anything you can buy in the supermarkets.

Peppers and ice

Clear skies in February have two useful effects for me. Bright intense much-needed sunlight for bringing on my pepper seedlings indoors, and frosty photo opportunities in the garden.

My home-made coldframe against the back wall of the house. Bloody cat!

Frosted sage leaf

There go the crocuses. D'oh!

More home-made frost protection. That's not horticultural fleece, it's the old lady's net curtains (who lived here before us). Bloody cat!

It's been about three weeks since I started sowing peppers, and most of them are up now. Some of them aren't, but those were old seeds of dubious viability. If you're wondering why I'm sowing old and dubious seeds, they're rare and hard-to-find varieties which were being given away by Association Kokopelli, so there's nothing to lose by trying them. Not much luck so far unfortunately, but they can be very slow to germinate so I'm not giving up on them just yet. Another "nothing-to-lose" experiment is the sowing of seeds from supermarket-bought peppers. I don't like just throwing away the seeds, especially from fruits that taste good. There is a risk of them being F1 hybrids or simply unsuitable for the UK climate, but I'm greatly encouraged by the success David at Evington Hilltop Adventures had last year from an experimental sowing of Tesco's Finest red pointy peppers.

Among the sweet pepper varieties already romping away are Corno Giallo from Franchi, Lipstick, Kaibi Round, Napia and Orange Bell from Real Seeds, and Pimento Perfection from Association Kokopelli. I'm also growing a few chilli peppers, Lemon Drop and Pretty in Purple from Real Seeds and Bulgarian Carrot from Nicky's Seeds. I love chillis (I like to cut up a fresh one and put it in a cheese sandwich then sit there going "aaaaaaargh!" as the endorphins explode around my brain) but I can't handle them too hot and my husband won't eat them at all, so there's no point growing too many however tempting they are.

Sweet pepper seedlings. Kaibi Round and Orange Bell.

The recommended way to start off peppers is in a heated propagator, since they germinate most efficiently in warm soil. However, I haven't got one. But I do have two decent windowsills with radiators underneath them, so I sow the peppers in modules, stick a polythene bag over them and dangle them in a tray over the radiator, turning them periodically so that both sides of the tray get a fair spell of dangling. It's a bit of a fudge but it gives me good germination within 12-16 days or so. And the unusually clear and bright weather we've been having, with several consecutive days of strong sunlight, has brought them on a treat this year. One of the windowsills is east-facing and the other west-facing, so to get the best out of it I move the pepper trays from one to the other each day as the sun moves over the house.

The crucial thing about growing peppers in the UK is to start them off early. February to early March is ideal. You can also improve your chances of a decent crop by choosing early-maturing varieties. One advantage of buying seed from Real Seeds is that they have diligently tried out a huge range of peppers and only sell the ones which consistently do well in the UK climate.

Among my pepper seedlings this year I have one of nature's little oddities ... a seedling with three cotyledons instead of the usual two. It's a phenomenon I've often come across in tomatoes too. Does anybody know why this happens? I've just been reading up on it and there's a suggestion that it's a genetic variation, possibly caused by a recessive gene with incomplete penetrance (i.e. which doesn't always express itself). Usually (in my experience) when the next set of leaves appear they revert to the two-leaf arrangement and grow normally.

Tricotyledonous mutation: three seed leaves instead of two on one of my Pretty in Purple chilli seedlings. The dark colouring in the leaves is normal for this variety.

Another seedling issue which peppers and tomatoes both share, presumably because they both emerge from the soil in the same way (in the form of a loop which straightens itself out) is that the seedling sometimes emerges with the seed case still stuck on its head. Normally the seed case stays in the soil, but if the seedling doesn't free itself quickly enough the seed case dries out with exposure to the air and becomes very firmly stuck. Left to its own devices the seedling will either struggle its own way out or die. If you have lots of seed you can just discard any that do this, but if you're sentimental like me and want to help the seedling free itself, the solution is a used tea-bag. After making a nice cuppa, squeeze the tea-bag over the seedling to get a few drops of tea onto the seed case. Then leave it, and repeat as necessary to keep it moist until the plant frees itself. The tannin in the tea is thought to soften the seed case, and the water and warmth will do the rest. It needs to be done sooner rather than later though, or the rescued seedling will have lost too much vigour to be able to catch up.