The parade of the tomatoes
The parade of the tomatoes happens each morning and afternoon. The tomatoes spend their nights in the house and each morning the trays are carried to the greenhouse where they spend their day in the light and warmth. Each afternoon the greenhouse starts to get shady, the temperature drops, and I carry them all back into the house.
"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours," as Mr Bennet says. And I make good sport for my neighbours, parading tomatoes and all my gardening mishaps.
The peppers and chillies also get paraded but only two chillies and one pepper have grown enough to be potted on. After I bought them a heat mat and everything. Ungrateful things.
A bunch of the tomatoes died but the rest seem to have stabilised. They are still very much on the small side. Some okra germinated, then that died. The cabbages were thoroughly mowed by slugs in the greenhouse but may pull through. I watch Emma's Allotment Diaries and she plays a game every time she arrives at the plot 'what's alive and what's died' which is me every time I go into the garden.
Worried about pumpkins I asked my wife how many we should keep. She was advocating ten, I thought this was too many. After a while she said, "How many do we have?" Twenty-six, I said. Which I don't think she was expecting. So some of them were taken off to the charity plant sale. As were some excess sunflowers.
The mouse has been feasting on peas and coriander seeds, planted in the greenhouse on the top shelf of the racks, over a metre high. Fair play to it. This is why I don't direct sow most stuff. That, the foxes, the pigeons, the cats.
We will have to buy onions soon. My hope of being self-sufficient has fallen short. This is a failure of storing rather than numbers. This year's onions are doing well and some carrots have made it past the slugs.
Chaos, as usual.
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