All this rainy weather has certainly made things grow well, the garden is positively verdant. I had hoped to be harvesting my own crops of salad vegetables, lettuce, radish, spring onions and tomatoes by now, but instead I’m paying over-the-top prices at the local supermarket for veggies I had planned on growing myself.
Last autumn I finally found the time to buy a small greenhouse. It was an optimistic first step towards bringing seedlings on and then growing some of my own food. Greenhouses come in all shapes and sizes, and all sorts of prices from pretty expensive to totally beyond the budget. I did the research (or so I thought) and bought a small plastic greenhouse - one you buy in a kit to build yourself. I decided on plastic because it seemed to me that it would be safer to have plastic rather than glass in the garden. The greenhouse kit arrived very quickly, and even came with free staging, so I thought I had a bargain.
I enlisted the (paid) help of a local handyman, and we made a start on building the construction. As soon as I saw the instruction sheet I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy task, and the expression on the ‘handy’ man’s face told me he was probably going to be worse than useless. And then, just when we’d taken everything out of the boxes and laid each and every piece out on the grass (for identification purposes) it started to rain. That was the beginning of a very long, frustrating and ultimately fruitless day.
I won’t go into a blow by blow account here, because even the memory is traumatic, but suffice it to say that the greenhouse structure still wasn’t finished at the end of the day, and it took many more days of krypton factor like sessions before it was (almost) finished. By then autumn had turned to winter and the planting season was over, so I made plans to begin my seed sowing in early spring, put my feet up in front of a crackling log fire and dreamt of eating lovely fresh organic produce when the days lengthened again in a few months time.
The Greenhouse I got
And then the winter storms hit, with full force, howling gales and driving rain. At first the little greenhouse seemed to be standing up well to the onslaught, but then, slowly but surely it began to fold (literally) under the pressure. By the end of the second day of severe gales there was nothing left but a heap of broken plastic panels and bent aluminium struts.
Late in March this year, at just the point when I should have been starting my greenhouse vegetable growing in earnest, I had to arrange to have the wreck of the greenhouse removed. Now an empty space takes the place of a green project and I have to admit that I haven’t the heart to start it again.
So, what have I learned?
1/ Cheap (relatively speaking) greenhouses are a complete waste of time, money and effort. Worse than that, they are a let down of your hopes, expectations and plans.
2/ Not all handy men are actually very handy :-(
3/ If you live in a notoriously windy seaside town you shouldn’t erect flimsy garden buildings. (I think I should have put this point first on the list!)
Today the rain has stopped and its lovely warm weather - the sun is out, the sky is uninterrupted blue, it’s a perfect day for a nice crisp salad for tea……..
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