July 2023

Words: Mrs Darling

Being in the middle of winter, but feeling like spring is coming, is like being stuck in a traffic jam, but your favourite song is playing on the radio.

We’re just past the middle of winter (23 July). It’s been a beautiful day, even quite warm once the sun was high enough in the sky. I put out three loads of washing then spent the rest of the day in the glasshouse. It was so warm in there the auto-vents were wide open. I had my iPods in, listening to a playlist of my favourite songs and really feeling as if spring was just around the corner. Well it’s a bit further down the road than that. But not too far – it’s actually only 5 weeks away. At my age that’ll flash by in a nanosecond.

So far this winter, we haven’t had a frost at our place. Not having one all winter has never happened in the more than 30 years we’ve lived here, so it doesn’t surprise me to find out (Met Service app on my phone) that it’s going to get pretty close to a frost tonight – down to 4 degrees C. That’s cold enough for the heater in the glasshouse to turn itself on which is a Very Good Thing because I need it to keep my plants reasonably snug. I’ve got seeds in punnets and pots and tender lettuces in the beds. The punnets and pots are all sitting on the heat pad though. I’ve planted tomatoes (Early Girl and Sweet 100s), cucumbers, butternut pumpkins, zucchinis and basil. I think the heat pad has a slightly warming effect on the glasshouse, but I can’t be sure. In any case, the seeds will be warm as.

In the picture above you can see a couple of tomato plants (back left). They’re self-seeded Sweet 100s from the legendary plant I pulled out last month. It produced thousands of tomatoes for 3 years and took over the entire glasshouse. I’ll plant these ones outside at Labour Weekend (21/22 October). They’ll be big and strong by then. I’ll put one Early Girl in the glasshouse, and the rest can also go outside.

My friend Colin “Bruiser” Smith sent me a photo of his tomato seedlings yesterday. They’re up to their second leaves. He’s probably a full month ahead of me. Not that it’s a competition, of course (*cough). I’d only really be competitive with him in my dreams. He had 80kgs of tomatoes in his freezer by the end of April, a lot of them grown in his glasshouse. Check out his marvellousness here when he did a guest post for me.

Last month I told you I’d planted some bean seeds, but none had germinated. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t come up at all. I was wrong (incredibly rare): they DID come up. That shows you how warm the soil is in the glasshouse because they need at least 15 degrees C to germinate. The beds in the glasshouse are slightly raised too and that makes a difference. Jo McCarroll, in the July issue of New Zealand Gardener magazine, wrote that she’d bought a soil thermometer and found the soil in her raised beds was 7 degrees C warmer than the ground, and the soil in her pots warmer still.

Yesterday I went to Mitre 10 with Dr Darling to buy a soil thermometer and came home with a pH- and moisture-probe instead. And some seedlings I hadn’t planned to buy (sugar snaps and lettuces – all now planted in the glasshouse). And some seeds for very pretty blue daisies. And some spraying oil.

The best part of going to Mitre 10 was checking out. On previous trips there Dr Darling would whip out his Airpoints card at the checkout, even if I was paying the bill, knowing I don’t carry mine. However, when I’d gone to Mitre 10 on my own a few days earlier (seeds, potting mix, punnets of irresistible seedlings), and the woman at the check out asked me if I had an Airpoints card, and I said “not with me, no”, she then asked if I had the Air NZ app on my phone. Well yes I did. She then showed me where to find the barcode for my Airpoints card on the app, scanned it, and sent me on my way. I could hardly wait for the next trip with Dr Darling. When we reached the checkout yesterday, and I was asked for my Airpoints card (I was paying), I saw him reach for his card wallet. With incredible speed (for someone my age), I found the app, brought up the barcode, and had it scanned. He was stunned, and I whooped with delight. Not that it’s a competition, of course. Because he’s such a good sport, he was delighted too, and we laughed all the way back to the car. I know what you’re thinking: that we probably need to get out more. You could be right.

August 2019

It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.

Yogi Berra

Words: Mrs Darling

It’s the middle of August and I thought you might be interested to read about what I’m up to in the Crystal Palace. I also thought it might be useful to have a record of what I did this month, so that I can look back and use it as a guide next year (if I’m spared, DVWP and all that). I’m old and forget stuff. You have to realise that this is the first August I’ve had a glasshouse, so don’t quote me, okay? I hardly know what I’m doing. It’d be marvellous if someone who does know what they’re doing would write things in the comments below.

Planting Seeds

The start of Spring is only two weeks away, and that means the time to plant all those lovely things for the summer is coming up fast. This time last year I had seeds in trays inside in the dining room, snug in the air conditioned 20 degree heat (68 Fahrenheit). I can’t remember what I grew (see above disclaimer about being old), but everything popped up beautifully. This year I’ve put in capsicum seeds, kale, and tong choi. I was going to grow Early Girl tomatoes from seed, but when I went to the nursery, they already had seedlings. I couldn’t resist. They give me at least a month’s head start on anything I can grow from seed right now. It made me realise I need to get tomato seeds in halfway through July. *Note to self.

The thing I want to tell you about here is that I have these seeds on a heat pad. Back in 2014 Virgil Evetts (RIP Virgil, I miss your wonderful gardening columns) had an article in the weekend newspaper magazine about using incandescent rope lights coiled around on the plastic lid of a large container. Dr Darling sprang to the challenge of creating our own. He used copper wire looped over the rope and through the plastic lid (see below).

It’s been wildly successful, but just when you’re getting excited about making your own, I’m sorry to have to tell you that it seems you can no longer buy incandescent rope lights – they’re all LED these days, and LED lights don’t give out heat. Perhaps some of you have old light ropes lying around in your garage, thinking they might be useful one day? (Dr Darling has squillions of things our garage with that sort of label.) Here’s what it looks like with the punnets in their tray on top:

It’s easy to water the seedlings by pouring water from the watering can into the tray. I let them soak for about an hour, then lift the punnets into a dry tray, popping them back onto the heat pad. I need to do this daily if it’s a sunny day. I turn the heat pad off during the day as the glasshouse gets quite warm now.

I grew capsicums from seeds which I planted back in May. They’re only just now big enough to plant out. They took nearly three weeks to germinate. However, (brace yourselves), on the heat pad, the first of the capsicum seeds planted on 5 August took only four days – that’s right, four days – to germinate. The kale came up in three days, and the tong choi was starting after three days – the two right hand punnets in the photo above, taken today, nine days after planting. Our South Island correspondent is experimenting with other ways of generating heat, and I hope she’ll report back In Due Course for us all to reap the benefits of her efforts. Heat is the biz.

Lettuce

Round about this time of year I start thinking of salads. It’s still cold at night, but the days are starting to warm up. The oak trees over the road in the park have started to leaf up. We have magnolias flowering in the garden, as well as some Spring bulbs – tiny daffodils, and freesias.

It really bugs me to buy lettuce in summer since they’re so easy to grow, so I’m keen to put some seeds and plants in now. I found some buttercrunch lettuce seedlings when I went to the nursery (I have to stop going, it’s costing me too much). I’ve planted them in the Crystal Palace. Our friend Grace has a glasshouse. She’s told me many times that lettuces grow like weeds in hers. I’m keen to see how they do in ours. Meanwhile we are picking between 30 and 50 cherry tomatoes a week from the glasshouse. All I need now is a cucumber and I’ll have a salad. I should have planted the seeds for these last month *note to self. Mind you, if they germinate as quickly as the capsicums etc, I might be able to get them to the same stage as they would have been if I’d planted them in July. I’ll get onto it this weekend.

Strawberries

I planted strawberry pups in April. Right now they’re starting to fruit. I’m feeding them with a strawberry fertiliser, and a liquid seaweed mix every few days. Anything that’s growing fast at the moment needs a boost. I have kohlrabi the size of golf balls – they’re getting fed too.

White Fly

I was dismayed to find white flies on my zucchini in the weekend. I’ve been battling powdery mildew on its leaves all winter, and now it has these little pests as well. You’ll all be busy making up my baking soda spray recipe for powdery mildew I trust, so you’ll know that one of the ingredients is a tablespoon of vegetable oil. I decided to replace that with a tablespoon of neem oil to see if I could kill the white fly at the same time as the powdery mildew. It worked spectacularly well.

What I’m Harvesting from the Glasshouse

• tomatoes
• spinach
• rainbow chard
• zucchinis
• carrots
• basil
• kale

Seeds Planted this Month in the Crystal Palace:

• cucumbers
• lettuce (buttercrunch)
• kale (cavalo nero)
• tong choi (Chinese water spinach)
• capsicums
• basil
• coriander
• chillies

Please do comment below if you have a glasshouse with things growing in it. We’d love to hear what you’re doing right now.