Sorting out the glasshouse

 It's Labour Weekend, which is the traditional time for planting out your summer crops like tomatoes, zucchinis and capsicums. However our weather has been all over the place - it was warm and summery today, but yesterday there was a frost, and a cold front is meant to blow in tonight - so I'm keeping my precious babies under glass for a few more weeks.

 I did pot up the tomatoes and capsicums who will be permanent glasshouse residents, and that required a bit of a reshuffle inside. Some of the tender plants who were overwintering under glass have had to make way.

 So far in pots I have seven tomatoes, five capsicums, two pots of mesclun lettuce and three gherkin vines. There are also all the punnets of seedlings I'm still raising. I grew all the tomatoes but one from seed, as well as the lettuce and gherkins, but I bought the capsicums as seedlings. I find them too fiddly to raise from seed without a heat mat or something, they take forever to come up so it's just easier to buy them as seedlings. Same for chillis, pumpkins and zucchini (although I have got a pot of zucchini seeds nestled in the compost bin, where it gets really warm, to see how they go).

My wooden chair still fits at this stage, and so does the Cat Mat and the Saucer. Mr Lui likes a selection of sleeping spots, and gave me the dirtiest of dirty looks when everything was out on the grass while I moved pots around. I managed to fit them both back in, luckily for me. Today he was sleeping in the glasshouse where it was around 30 degrees, and as he got too hot he would get up and move from the Saucer to the Cat Mat, stretch out, get too hot again, move back to the Saucer, stretch out, etc.

Little green strawberries are forming in the strawberry baskets. One has the faintest blush on it. Not long now...

Intermission

Time to interrupt the garden tours for a brief update on my garden. Look, I've got flowers on my peanut! I'd only recently transplanted it into a bigger planter and I wasn't expecting any action for ages.

The planter is rubbish though. I bought it from The Warehouse and it's basically this big bag with holes cut in the top. I thought it would be good for the peanut because I don't know how big it will get and I can cut more holes if it needs to spread, but ugh I hate this planter bag. It's ugly and flops everywhere, it's impossible to move when full, and when watering the water just runs off the top of the plastic and drains away outside - this is unacceptable waste under water restrictions!

I think I might carefully remove the peanut and capsicum and put them into pots this weekend. I'll probably have to slice up the bag to get the potting mix out.

Also, would anyone like to come and shoot blackbirds in my garden? You can use a shotgun or a guided missile, I don't really care, just take the buggers out. Look at the mess they've made. This was a carefully mulched area, and they've had a field day tossing it all over the paths. You can see that they have actually gone all around the edges making sure as much mess is spread over the paths as possible. They do this anywhere that I spread mulch. Sometimes I put down bird netting, but I have to take it up once the seedlings get big.

Looks like Mr Lui is failing in his duties... I better go have a word with him.

(The second last garden tour will be up later tonight!)

The Supervisor

 He has his own chair - all the better for watching from.

 And my chair too as soon as my back is half turned, for that all-important supervisory nap. We work hard around here!

In the glasshouse, and raindrops in the garden

My number one chore for this weekend was cleaning out the glasshouse. Saturday was perfect weather-wise, so I dragged everything outside, got out the hose and let it rip. I washed down the walls, blasted the spiders and scrubbed away the cobwebs. (Fortunately there was no repeat of this incident.) Everything dried nicely in the sun, and I spent the rest of the afternoon putting it back in and arranging it. By the time I was done the light was no good for taking photos, so I took these on Sunday morning. Of course, by then it was raining, so just ignore the puddles on the floor and the foot and paw prints everywhere...

At the back left corner are two tomato plants, bravely struggling on. One is Juliet and one is Yellow Pear. Neither is particularly happy, they have both been stripped by caterpillars and I'm sure they will keel over when regular frosts set in. But in the meantime, they are producing fruit. It's a bit weak and watery but still beats a supermarket tomato!

At the back right is my mandarine, Clementine. I rather badly neglected her over summer and only recently realised (when her leaves turned black with mould) that she had a bad case of scale. So I cleaned her up and repotted her, and resolved to take better care in the future. I've also harvested two mandarins off her so far and there are about another three on there, so she is worth looking after!

Also in that corner is a chocolate cosmos, which is looking rather dead but I will trim it back, and it should emerge in spring again. And there is a pot with some tiny parsley seedlings, a pansy and a small bunch of spring onions (they are all found seedlings that were growing together in the same patch of the garden).

I built this bench out of some pallet wood and bricks. It's pretty sturdy so should withstand minor aftershocks, I think if we get another big one a toppled potting bench will be the last thing on my mind... Anyway, it is home to spare pots and saucers, a plastic bottle cloche, and some seedlings. 

On the left are onions - I had two opened packets, one red and one white. I sowed the seed thickly because I read that onion seed needs to be fresh to germinate so I figured it may or may not work. Well, every single red seed germinated and none of the white. So I'll need to find homes for about a hundred red onions come spring. Next to them is a Sunset's Red Horizon tomato, my workmate sowed some seeds as an experiment to see if they really are frost resistant. So we'll see if it survives over winter. Next to that is some broccoli, again it was old seed and every single one sprouted. Must be 30-40 of them. And next to that is a Winter Savoury seedling, that's supposed to be a perennial herb that doesn't die off over winter, but this one doesn't really want to get going at all. It's been there for a couple of months. I had to prop it with a small stick because it kept falling over. Chin up little plant!

Here is the heliotrope, also frost tender so I bring her in as well. The vanilla scent is gorgeous. Soon I'll have to bring my geraniums in as well, I lost two last year to the frost so I'll look after them a bit more this year.

After all the hosing and scrubbing I hung my gloves out to dry. Then I forgot about them, and they got a second rinse overnight.

The rain made all the autumn colours pop! This purple broccoli will be ready soon. The sad little pumpkin next to it, not so much - it needs to be harvested now, but is nowhere near ripe.

I planted mizuna at the front of the middle quarter. I was trying to go for that classic potager look of the low hedge. The mizuna is working well - I also sowed corn salad in two of the beds, to compare which looks better, but it's growing much slower. It's possible that the mizuna could go to seed in the next couple of months, so the slower growing corn salad could still win the race. Each quarter bed has a small rosemary bush in the middle which should look lovely when in flower - I'll show you pics when that happens.

And a rainbow to finish on. Next weekend I have to tidy the potting area, and the one after that I will be tidying the garden shed.  The fun never stops around here!