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Posted on 2023-04-16 by Nick Thomas
Over the last three months, my aubergines seeds have been developing into plants. 19/20 germinated. 3 of them failed early, and the remaining sixteen have been growing vigorously on the south-facing windows of the house. I was surprised to learn that they can be quite thorny.
This was a bit of a race with the weather; aubergines can't go in an unheated greenhouse until the frosts are over, and ideally it'd be 10°C overnight. In the end, I put them into the greenhouse this week - we're generally at 5°C overnight, and we had simply run out of space on the windowsills. Six were already living in a little greenhouse in the back garden during the day, coming inside whenever the weather turned bad. So, here they are, all planted out:
It remains to be seen how well they respond to their new living conditions. A couple seem to be struggling to take in water; if I lose them, my success rate drops from 80% down to 70%, so fingers crossed for them. My babies!
The aubergines aren't the only thing happening on the allotment, though. The sweetcorn field is uncovered and ready to go next month; I've built a frame for the beans to grow up, and will plant them this month; onions and leeks are in; the rhubarb is coming through strongly; the raspberries are full of life. I've also got a large number of tomato seedlings, and a smaller number of peppers, ready to go to the allotment to pot on / plant out.
Less positively, the asparagus appears to be dead. I wonder if I killed it by cutting back earlier than I should have last year, or mulching too heavily. Perhaps it was doomed not to survive the winter, no matter what I did.
I've also discovered that we have couch/twitch, which is a sterile grass that spreads through some pretty ridiculous rhizomes. It's awful to root crops and not great for anything else either. In a non-glyphosate plot, the best option is to fork it up and pick the rhizomes out of the soil. You can't catch them all, of course, so you have to do this every time you see a new blade of grass come up. It's pretty time-consuming, but I'm making progress. The aubergine greenhouse was previously overrun, and so was the leek bed, and they're both usable now.
Onwards!
Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Contact the author by email: gemini@ur.gs
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