Green shoots

Better seedlings  

There was a moment in the new Reginald Perrin series on BBC One this Friday night where, sat on a crowded train and surrounded by earphone wearing, bored commuters all crammed in to each other’s spaces (see yesterday’s post) Martin Clune’s Reggie has a dream, where he stands up and say’s ‘lets all have a chat!” and the carriage then comes alive with conversation and laughter. The train journey is transformed from drudgery to party as everyone starts talking.

 I can’t help thinking that the inside of public transport spaces are ripe for some bright spark to do something clever with. How about a ‘community space’ section where you could sit and chat, or a reading section where you could leave your current paperback when you’ve finished it or start a mobile book club. It wouldn’t reduce the overcrowding but it might make the journey more entertaining. We think this might be the first job for the middleagemum community police.

 Meanwhile we live with the stress of the commute in our own space bubbles and search for relief once we get home. The Women’s Room gets its kicks from gardening (as does everyone else now it seems, is it us or has the whole world gone mad on growing your own food?) so this weekend we’re channelling Valerie Finnis’s look of pearls, floral frocks and mad hats and heading into the greenhouse.

It is time to sow some of the great seeds we were talking about earlier, and so this weekend we’ve tipped tomato, cucumber and chilli seeds into small pots and put them in the propagator. Seeds will try really hard to grow, so a propagator might seem a bit of a luxury, it’s not. My old prop is ancient, cost me about £30 (Lakeland do a similar one) and has made everything I have put in it germinate. Within two weeks I will be over run with baby plants, I find it stupidly hard to throw seedlings away, I will only need six tomato plants but I know I will end up potting on about twenty because I just CAN’T throw them away after they have taken all that trouble to grow,

 If all this sounds too hard then get yourself some mixed salad seeds, sown in two week intervals from now until about July you will be up to your sprigged floral armpits in lovely lettuce. As we mentioned previously, if you sow salad leaves in portable pots or pretty tins you can bring them in when they are in peak condition and adorn the house with edible plants. Very Petersham Nurseries.

We buy our seeds from Seeds of Italy Thompson & Morgan  and try Lakeland garden for propagaters and other gardeing equiptment.

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