It’s only taken half a year, but my greenhouse is now finally ready for things to be planted in it! It has all its windows, won’t blow away and after a trip to Wickes the ground is now suitable for growing plants again.
Can confirm the manure is real manure, from real cows, it might take a bit to get the smell out the car. The compost is some sort of weird fluffy nonsense full of sticks and a random nail. It’s not very good. I’ve used it to plant some beans and peas so they can germinate out the reaches of hungry pigeons. It’s not even pretending to be shredded wood or the other poorly composted garden waste they normally sell in bags.
The greenhouse now stinks a bit, so I will leave the manure to rot down a bit more. I’ve dug it into the soil so hopefully the worms and things will get at it too. This is a before photo, I didn’t think to take an after one.
Here’s the green manure I sowed the other week. It’s rained a lot recently so everything is starting to grow really well.
There’s a small weed problem over on the bit where I am trying to grow carrots and parsnips. I can’t tell what anything is, and without picking out individual weeds this mess is just going to have to fight it out until nothing is at risk from an unexpected hoe slicing its leaves off.
After moving the shed I was left with a patch of ground that is relatively low in weeds and planned on using it as just another area for growing things. However, after getting rid of the other greenhouse I was also left with a greenhouse base that either needed giving away to the local metal fairies or reusing somehow. So I had an idea…
If I removed all the grass, flattened a lump of grass that I built up after last year’s wasp incident and dug in the remains of a compost pile, I’d have a nice area for growing more delicate plants.
Also it’d thoroughly dig up the ground where the wasps were, so future ones didn’t get any ideas.
My trusty battery powered rotavator chewed the ground up fairly well, and after some mildly dangerous antics with the greenhouse base, I had an area that was enclosed which should help keep the weeds out.
The next step was to actually plant things in there. The Range were selling strawberry plants, and after the demise of Wilko they also seem to have bought all their stock and are selling it off cheap. So Wilko’s 99p seed packets were 50p.
The second photo is for my reference too. There’s two rows of beetroot, two rows of carrots and then several rows of parsnip. The ground had a really good chewing with the rotavator and now actually resembles something you could grow plants in, rather than a field that’s had the grass ripped out.
The final stage was to set up a small plant cover I’d bought off Amazon. It’s one of those kits made from the tubular metal and plastic connectors that tends to last a season at best before something fails or the wind takes it away. I’ve tried to buy a more robust one so maybe it’ll last all year if I’m careful?
It was a bit bigger than I expected too…
The only irritating thing is the plastic cover doesn’t have many straps for tieing it to the frame. I hope it doesn’t explode in the wind the next time we have a storm.
To prevent this I got creative. I was tempted to attach it to the greenhouse base, but once the parsnips and carrots have grown a bit I’m intending on moving the cover to another part of the plot to cover something else.
We’re almost at the last frost of the year, which to me is the actual start of the year when it comes to growing things. Here’s a bit of an update since the last post…
November – it rained a lot and got cold
December – it rained a lot, got colder, I was ill
January – it rained a lot, was insanely windy and even colder
February – maximum coldness, even windier. The final week it didn’t rain, I managed to go and survey the mess.
March – now.
So we’re in March, people down South have mentioned snow. Last year it snowed around this time and was -4c. I’ve at least bought all the seeds I want to grow and have been trying to clear and better organise the plots.
During the insane wind one of the greenhouses tried to fold itself flat so one of the jobs I’ve been doing is removing the glass from it to put into the other greenhouse. I’m going to just have one, the space can be used for something else.
I did try to see if the greenhouse would just stand back up, it is made from bolted together aluminium after all. However some of it snapped and other bits twisted out of shape, which just shows how windy it was – a greenhouse with no windows managed to get blown so hard it snaped in places.
Intent on turning something kind of annoying into a positive situation I realised there was enough glass in both greenhouses to make one greenhouse be complete. This would save me quite a lot of money. I just needed to take the broken frame down. It’s been up quite a long time and came to me part assembled, and the aluminium bolts pushed into aluminium frames seem to have welded and corroded themselves together. It was not going to come apart easily.
So I bought a new toy…
And 20 minutes later it turned a wonky frame of a greenhouse into a flat packed stack of scrap metal. I was expecting some effort but once the blade bit into the metal it ate through it like it was nothing.
I decided since it’s so windy moving the shed would be a good idea. It can go behind the greenhouse. This will shelter the shed from being blown over, and help prop the greenhouse up. It also means I need less glass to fill in the missing gaps.
The first job was to clear the back of the plot. A place I’ve rarely gone and it’s mostly full of rubbish thrown over the fence from the houses behind and junk that I’ve abandoned and forgotten about.
I put some weed matting down to try and keep the brambles at bay, and then moved eight pretty heavy paving slabs from elsewhere on the plot to make a base for the shed.
When moving the slabs I managed to find all the frogs, and moved them to the pond out the way.
The next jobs on the plot are to dig over the beds so they’re ready for planting, and to get the shed moved and the greenhouse ready. I’m going to use it for starting off plants until they’re big enough to go outside. Anything that needs more warmth can start on my kitchen window or something. Or I’ll put them in my shed at home with the grow lights if they still work.
Standing in the back of my plot is The Greenhouse. It’s actually two stuck together like some sort of human centipede arrangement. We gained one greenhouse free from another plot, and then an ex-colleague of mine gave me his for free too, and they just happened to be identical.
Putting it up was a bit of a mission with no instructions, half the bolts missing and it not being very square. Also it went dark…
They had the usual free greenhouse condition of requiring glass, but that was solved by a trip to a local glass merchant who sold greenhouse glass for a sensible price.
Then, over time the door fell off, wind helped remove some of the glass and then between my own clumsiness and some local thieving bastards the rest of the glass just disappeared. And then the weeds and neck high grass took over.
After much procrastination I decided I really should sort the mess out. Also I had some tomato plants that needed planting properly if I was to get anything out of them this year. Last year’s tomatoes in grow bags were a bit sad looking by the end.
This is where I’m supposed to say it wasn’t as bad as I thought, and that it just needed a bit of strimming. Nah, it was worse than I thought and needed more than a bit of a strim. If you strim long grass it either binds up the strimmer, or lays flat over grass you’ve not yet done and it’s hard to tell which grass needs cutting.
I managed to clear a path towards the back, finding lots of lost and covered rubbish (a visit to the tip is a future problem). All round the thing were pieces of wrist-slashingly sharp glass just poking out the grass waiting for an unwary hand.
Once the outside was “done” I ventured inside. Since the soil was so dry I found a rake and a lot of manual labour was the way to clear things. Except the ants, they seem to live in the corner now. Also I discovered the strimmer’s metal blade is quite sharp.
Finally though, after much sweating, a bit of a sit down out the sun to recover and three bananas later I had my tomatoes planted in what looked to be soil.
A job for the future is to get some new glass to replace the missing panels. Amazon sell plastic sheets the correct size for a reasonable price. Being plastic I should be able to glue them in to deter thieving bastards.
I don’t understand why someone stole the glass out my greenhouse, but didn’t nick my mower when the shed blew over. It’s very odd. Might write my plot number across the plastic panels when I get them.
The original shed hasn’t yet magically disappeared. I’ll get around to it one day.
