Flowers

Flowers, oh so many flowers. One of the jalapeño plants that wasn't as far along as the others has gone into super speed mode, overtaken all of them, has 5 open flowers and is now growing the first chilli :)

This has cheered me up and almost makes up for the massively stressful day yesterday. The wind was incredibly strong and it managed to move the whole greenhouse and knock most of the plants off of the shelves, spilling compost everywhere and damaging quite a few young plants. I'm a very calm person, but I got really annoyed by it. Every time I tidied it up a bit, the wind would come back and ruin everything again. The weather's been much better today though.

This is one of the plants that started off purple. It's not as pretty now that the purple's gone :(

It seems like the purpleness is trying to spread, but the plant is growing too quickly.

The next batch of purple chilli plants, although these have outgrown the purpleness incredibly quickly. There's only 3 left that are properly purple. This picture also shows one of the problems I've been having. As you can see, there's green algae-looking stuff on the surface of the compost. I think this is caused by dampness and bad circulation, both of which I'm now working on improving because this stuff is on damn near all of my plants.

My habanero, ring of fire and hungarian hot wax chilli seedlings. Planted a bit late in the year, but hopefully the growdrobe can get them to grow a bit faster than they would outdoors so they'll catch up with the others.

In the top left of the picture, you can see the beer can reflector I made after reading about cheap ways to improve my lighting situation. It seems to be working pretty well, so I'll put one on each of the lights tomorrow, I think.

The petals starting to wilt and fall off to make way for the first chilli that you can see starting to grow in the center, yay :)

Not sure what to write about this one, I just like the picture.

This is a slightly old picture, but I thought I'd post it because it's my little mutant plant. It has 3 cotyledons instead of the usual 2. I did a little bit of googling, apparently this is the plant equivalent of siamese twins.

In other news, the massively overcrowded radish/parsnip/carrot bucket isn't as bad as I thought. The radishes are actually growing perfectly happily, I've been pulling up and eating handfuls of them every few days. Also, I bought 3 new plants on ebay. Ordered them one day, they arrived the next, it was awesome. They're chocolate mint plants, so they have the lovely smell of mint but with a hint of chocolate. They smell just like After Eights.

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First flower & massive update

My first chilli flower has finally opened, and as you can see in the background, the others will be opening pretty soon :)
Fun fact: my camera sucks at focusing on the right things when taking close-up pictures. When you add to that the fact that the humidity in the greenhouse kept fogging up the lens, I'm amazed I managed to get a picture at all.

I think I'll make this update a picture-heavy update, instead of the wall of text that I usually post.

1 of the new strawberry plants that I bought from B&Q to increase my eventual harvest. I bought Elsanta, Pegasus and Cambridge Favourite. That means I now have a total of 5 strawberry plants, but I'm not sure what variety the other 2 are as I got them from my auntie's garden. Also, 1 kale.

Jalapeño forest. These are just a few of my jalapeño plants, so I should get a nice sized overall harvest.

My new batch of tomatoes. These should grow to be huge plants with huge fruits, fingers crossed.

4 of my onions, with some newly planted carrot and parsnip seeds around the outside. These onions will never grow to be huge, but that pot is bigger than it looks in the picture so they should grow pretty nicely. I have a few more onions in other pots and things, so I'll have plenty of them to eat.

My newly constructed vegetable patch thing. Simple job, just moved the gravel stuff that was there, pulled up the weed-cover stuff, dug it all over a bit and mixed in some compost and fertiliser, then added some bricks I had lying around to keep the stones out. I plan on getting rid of all of the stones and turning the whole thing into a vegetable/flower patch eventually. That little section has had a few things put in it since I took the picture and it's already feeling cramped.

The radish/carrot/parsnip bucket from an earlier post. This is after some serious thinning-out, and it's still incredibly overcrowded. I put way more seeds in than I needed. If you look carefully, you can just about see some baby carrots and parsnips, being deprived of light by the radishes. I'll do some more thinning out today.

My new water spray/mist bottle. I absolutely love it. I know it's weird to get excited about a spray bottle, but this one is so awesome compared to my last one that broke after just a few weeks. I wish I'd had this from the start, it would have made watering seedlings so much easier.

I'll save the rest of the updates (yeah, there's more) for another time, this post is too long already. If you made it this far, congratulations.

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