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All the Seeds!

 The greenhouse staging is filling up nicely with seeds trays after yesterday’s seedfest planting effort on my part. Determined to grow more flowers for the garden this year, I’ve started off : pansies, cornflowers, cosmos, nasturtiums, evening primroses and some sunflowers, courtesy of a packet Heather sent me in a birthday card. I have also, optimistically, sown some of the seeds I collected when this plant threw out a couple of flower spikes last year…


It’s called Haworthia Limifolia, or (more charmingly) Fairies’ Washboard. According to all the books it grows to around 4 inches in diameter and is therefore ‘perfect for window ledges and desks.’ This one, however, is already 6.5 inches in diameter. It clearly likes where it lives, which is on the bathroom window ledge, and how I’ve been treating it, which is giving it a light shower once every six weeks or so. Anyway, in the spirit of optimism and my tendency towards no-faff, mildly slapdash gardening approaches, I’ve popped ten seeds into small pots and left them in the greenhouse to see what happens. Very much “Oh well, you know, fingers crossed, c’est la vie if nothing happens.’ Inadvertently, though, my instinctive choice of greenhouse over propagator appears to be correct because the seeds require rollercoaster temperatures to kick start them i.e hot during day, cold overnight which is what March is currently delivering! 

On to the propagator then…

We’ve owned ours for upwards of twelve years now and it’s always with a frisson of tension that it is plugged in each Spring to see if it still works, or has expired because it is stored very badly during Winter i.e chucked into the shed. As demonstrated by the condensation this morning, it is very much still working…


Fret ye not, I have opened the ventilators in the cover! Inside are : basil, chives, cherry tomatoes, my favourite standard tomato of ALL TIME which is ‘Tigerella’ and some red hot chilli peppers (not the band). The propagator is situated in the kitchen on the small piece of work surface between the Aga and the wall. It’s just big enough and gets light from the smallest of the kitchen windows. It’s the window Bambino likes to sit in to watch the goings on in the courtyard. He’s going to have a bit of an obstacle course reaching the window now. As long as he doesn’t decide to use the propagator as a spring board and kick the whole lot off the worktop, we shall be okay. Oh goodness, I wish I hadn’t written that now. Talk about tempting fate. 

By mid-afternoon, then, I was happily settling down to watch one of my favourite films - ‘This Beautiful Fantastic’ which was showing on BBC2, therefore no commercial breaks which are a sure fire way to ruin any film. It is also an hour and a half long, which, in my humble opinion, is the perfect length for a film.


The film stars Jessica Brown Findlay (fans of ‘Downton Abbey’ will know her as the ill-fated Lady Sybil Crawley) and Tom Wilkinson (who has been in many fine British films including ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’). I love this film because it combines being a writer with gardening with cooking with being slightly odd and on the periphery of society. It is a very gentle film with no violence, no coarse language, and plenty of gentle humour. It has a tinged with optimistic sadness but happily ever after ending which never fails to inspire and lift my spirits. It is a film of the magic and wonderment we can find in every day life. Of the beautiful and the fantastic. 

And then, because I’d planted lots of seeds in the morning it was necessary for me to finish the afternoon by placing another seed order to replenish my seed packet storage box. Well, I had a 20% off voucher code. It would have been rude not to.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Looks like a must watch movie. Thanks for making me aware of it.
KJ
21 March 2022 at 06:50
Denise said…
I love it, KJ. It’s a feel good film and I hope you get to see and enjoy it.
21 March 2022 at 10:20
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