And so, it ends

Not with a bang, but with an "Oh, for fuck's sake." This was what I harvested today:

In my garden at present, ready to eat, there is one potential swede, the bags of potential Christmas potatoes and the jerusalem artichokes. That's it. And the freezer drawer from the autumn is looking empty already. I think we can officially say that I would not survive winter on my own and while it would theoretically be possible to go the year round without buying any vegetables, that would mostly be through takeaways and pizza.

Today, I go to the grocer's. Sad times.

Still, while the challenge is ended (and I don't think I'll ever try it again in quite so stern a format as I did this year), it has been fun and a hell of a learning experience. It's a long way from over yet - there's still brussel sprouts (hopefully) and purple broccoli, with cauliflower, broad beans, carrots and sea kale overwintering to hopefully come up in the spring. However, I thought that here (at the end of all things), might be a good time to reflect on things that I've learned:

1) Brassica cages and other forms of netting are brilliant. Everything wants to eat your edible garden if it can and even lethal amounts of pesticides don't really do the job. It's a hell of a lot easier to just seal off anything leafy from the evil things that want to destroy it.

As a corollary to this, I think that kale, spinach and chard may become indoor plants next year. I had great success with bringing lettuce inside and keeping it on a windowsill last year, with the only problem being that I don't actually like lettuce that much. I like kale, spinach and chard, but unfortunately so does the local wildlife, so I don't see much of it.

2) Some things aren't worth the bother. The white cauliflowers that I grew squatted in my garden, taking up masses of space and produced the square root of fuck all. The carrots also achieved little to nothing for lots of effort. Don't get me wrong - I like eating both cauliflowers and carrots, but I can go to the grocers with a fiver and come out with three large cauliflowers, a massive bag of carrots and change.

Next year, I'm cutting back on growing things that I can easily get the same quality easier and cheaper from the grocers. Purple carrots and orange cauliflowers are going to be the order of the day, along with asparagus peas, kokihi, purslane, sea kale, day lilies, dahlia yams, chinese artichokes and oca.

3) Other things are definitely worth the bother. Fresh potatoes, while still being a pain in the arse, do taste better. Sweetcorn, courgettes and mange tout as well. Broccoli and green beans aren't massively different in taste to those from the shops, but they produce masses of edible goodness in a relatively small space and the cut-and-come-again means that you get loads of meals out of them. Parsnips will also get a pass for being awesome.

4) Sometimes it's worthwhile buying seedlings rather than growing from seed. This entry shows the difference between a commercially-grown cauliflower seedling and my windowsill effort. It's very satisfying to grow something just from seed (the fact that I not have a fully-fledged globe artichoke plant speaks to that), but on other occasions it's not worth grinding your own flour.

Secondary to that is making use of grafted plants. My aubergines that I grew from seed achieved sod all, while the grafted one kept going way into winter and had to be actively put down to save the soil for next year. Little bit more expensive than growing your own, but a heck of a lot less frustrating.

5) Raspberries kick the shit out of strawberries. They've not come up on the blog much, but I bought 12 raspberry canes earlier this year and they've been producing solidly from August right the way through to December. Meanwhile, my strawberry bed emitted a brief flurry of strawberries in May and June and then settled down to producing leaves and nothing else (despite the bed allegedly containing several different varieties that should've done the whole season). Plus, there's very few pests willing to climb to get a raspberry off a cane. I think the strawberry bed might have one more year to try and redeem itself and then it might get repurposed the year after that.

What I did have success with was strawberry hanging baskets by the door. They also only produced a brief flurry, but they had the advantage of being a) away from pests and b) right there when I walked out the door. An experiment to be repeated.

I also managed to get at least 4 edible pears and 5 figs off my trees, although I expect more next year as they mature and come into their own. The dessert grapes were a massive, massive disappointment - lots of production, but what we ate made us horribly ill. There's several theories for this: I possibly accidentally picked from the wrong vine and picked unripe red grapes instead of green ones, the grapes themselves were small so perhaps not ready, we maybe didn't wash them as well as we could, the grape vines may possibly just be evil and looking to destroy us - there's lots of possibilities.

Unsurprisingly, we waited until the grapes were 100% definitely ripe, possibly even overripe, before picking the next set. Then we let them rot in the fruit bowl as my wife and I engaged in a grape-based Cold War of seeing who'd break first and eat the grapes "that were probably totally fine, really!"

Next year, there may be some kind of grape jam or amateur wine so that the evil can be processed out before we consume them.

5) Fuck carrots. Also leeks grow underground, courgettes grow huge when not in pots, pumpkins are a danger to everything while producing nothing, and parnsips can (and should) be grown in whatever leftover pot and space is available. Also, I should not be allowed to build things.

6) Winter vegetables need their own, dedicated bed with a brassica cage. Having watched my winter kale and spinach die horribly out in the open (partly through pests, partly through next door's cats pooping on them), I've decided that they need to be undercover. Also, everything needs to start earlier if I'm expecting to get crops through the year, which rules out any more misguided sharing with other main crops. I may plant quick-growing catch-crops, like mange-tout, rapini, ball carrots and chop-suey greens, for the spring, but nothing which I wouldn't be happy tearing up if the winter veg needed to go in before they were ready to go out.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the growing year so far. I went from June to December without buying any vegetables (a month longer than last year) and I got to eat many more things than I did last year. The count of things which I successfully ate from my garden this year is: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, courgette, mange tout, broad beans, green beans, french beans, sweetcorn, spinach, kale, nasturtiums, carrots (for certain values), parsnips, leeks, lettuce, aubergines, green peppers, red peppers, potatoes, onions, garlic, tomatoes, rhubarb, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, figs and pears. Plus there is still rapini, brussel sprouts, swede and jerusalem artichoke to go.

The most important this was that I learned a lot and, as we all know, knowledge is half the battle. The other half is brutally murdering slugs.

PJW

PS. Fuck carrots.

Beanpocalypse!

This month has mostly been about beans.

This was the first harvest. I've brought in about four times as much since then.

The garden has 10 runner bean plants planted to grow up a bamboo A-frame, another three in a planter by the door and a selection of 5-6 dwarf yellow French beans to go in the Three Sisters bed. I am coming to the conclusion that I have overplanted. For the past fortnight, the question has not been, "What shall we have for dinner?" but, "What are we eating with the beans?"

Still, I'd rather this than be struggling for what to put on the plate like I was in June. The garden is now providing a bit of variety - I've had broccoli and cabbage and courgette and potato and beans of course. We have had two new things this year. The first is onions, which is kinda sad considering that they were one of the first things I tried to grow three years back. I've had sort-of onions in previous years, but they were sad little failures that I only ate because I'd put work into them. This year, they're actually worth the name.

The second new thing is aubergines, which is very exciting. I did try growing my own from seed, but they didn't really get anywhere, possibly because they failed to get repotted during a busy period. The success story has come from a grafted plant, which is quite a nifty idea if you're happy to pay the extra. Basically, the garden centre grow a plant that has a big, strong and sturdy root system and then decapitate it. They then graft a plant that normally had a weedy or temperamental root system (like aubergine, tomato, cucumber, etc) onto the stump and encourage the two halves to bond.

It's a brilliant idea, because instead of having a boring plant that's really good at absorbing nutrients and a useful plant that dies if you cough on it, you have a Frankenstein's monster that's hardy and useful. The idea was taken to it's zenith when somebody managed to create the utterly pointless, but kinda cool, TomTato, which is a cherry tomato plant that grows potatoes with its roots.

Like Frankenstein's monster, but without its creator being a complete emo tool. Note also, the photo-bombing green bean in the top right.

Anyway, the grafted aubergine has produced enough already to make the sole recipe I know with aubergine, which is pork chops with an aubergine/tomato thing. Very nice indeed.

One other thing which has been new this year is coloured vegetables. I've tried before without much luck, but I've already managed to get a whole meal out of them: yellow courgettes, yellow beans and purple carrots.

A carrot of a half-decent size! Not from the experimental pot though - I'll update on that in the next post.

The one major thing missing from that dish is the interesting-coloured cauliflowers that I planted way back in March. I have yet to see hide nor hair of an actual cauliflower head forming so far, even on the ones that I cheated and bought from the garden centre. The grand plan was supposed to have me eating cauliflower back in May/June, but I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if I was just even more over-optimistic than I'd realised. I'm sure last year I had cauliflowers before now, but they were sickly things riddled with caterpillars that tasted absolutely disgusting, so it's entirely possible that the heads were formed in a final doomed effort to procreate before death by pests.

All mouth. No trousers.

The non-production of cauliflower is pretty much solely responsible for the traffic jam of winter vegetables. The orphanage for displaced brassicae is falling apart, pretty much as quickly as you would expect my bodge-work to do, and it's going to be interesting to see if I actually get to transplant any more of the winter veg before they are completely stripped back to the stem by caterpillars and slugs. I may be going hungry come January.

PJW

Success!

What I harvested from my garden this evening:

It's not perfect, but there's enough for a portion of potatoes, a portion of carrots and mange tout, and rhubarb crumble for me and my wife tomorrow night (plus some strawberries). And it all came from the magic seeds* I planted in my garden. Hurray!

PJW

*Technically speaking, the mangetout comes from magic seedlings bought from the garden centre as the slugs ate the ones I grew from seed. Still totally counts though.

More promise, fewer results

Long pause between updates, as the play I've been in came to conclusion. Great fun to do, but massively tiring and hasn't left me much time for anything that's not play or daughter. On the bright side, I've been surviving mostly on junk food, so the continued lack of vegetables hasn't proved too much of a problem.

Actual size

The carrots have continued to be pitiful, despite my attempts at appropriate fertiliser. I have some theories as to why that is - I think I've spaced them too closely together and have possibly pulled them up a little too early - but any suggestions from the audience would be appreciated.

On the bright side, the garden has flourished in the face of being neglected for a week or so.

From the humble original seedling of a few months back...

To the "Holy crap, broccoli!" of today

There's promise of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and also imminent courgettes and beans.

It still seems like magic to me that all of these came from tiny little seeds. Doesn't seem possible. Of course, the promise of  vegetables isn't quite the same as actually getting some. We'll see next month, I guess

The major change to the garden this month is that I've got rid of one of my many sheds. It was falling apart and a fortuitous turn of events allowed me to get it taken away for free by someone who thought they could rebuild it on their allotment, but it has given me the nice side-effect of giving me more room for another vegetable bed.

Spot the difference.

I'm resolutely not building anything there yet, as I want to see how this year's harvest goes before deciding what I want to put there. I'm currently struggling to fit everything in that I wanted to grow this year, especially the winter vegetables. The purple sprouting broccoli is going great guns and I've got nowhere to put it until I've harvested a few cauliflowers. At the moment, pots are my friend, but it's not a permanent solution. Hopefully, it won't stunt the winter vegetables; despite my appalling start, I really would like to have year-round vegetables.

Next challenge is going to be sowing seeds for the overwintering spring vegetables and then attempting to grow carrots that you can't pick your teeth with.

PJW

And the results are...

No, not really.

I should point out for the sake of perspective that that's my tiny wife's tiny hand. So they're even smaller and weedier than they appear.

To say this is disheartening is something of an understatement. I was hoping to get two, maybe even three meals worth out of those carrots, instead of a bunch of spindly little things which I'm scared to peel lest they disappear.

Nevermind. They shall be eaten in one glorious swoop this week and we shall go back to the drawing board a touch.

The problem with these carrots, I believe, is that they weren't fertilised enough. By which, of course, I hadn't got round to fertilise them at all. I thought they'd do all right; they were in pots of pure compost so there must have been enough nutrients for them to grow big and strong, right? Wrong. Well, sort of wrong.

Vegetables need three things to grow big: nitrogen, phosporus and potash (potassium). Nitrogen does the up - the leafy bits, phosporus does the down - the roots and stuff below ground, and potash does the all around - the general health of the plant. The compost which I planted the carrots in had a roughly even mix of NPK, which is great if you're growing a lettuce and find the green leafy bits just as important as everything else. Slightly less good if you're planning on throwing away the green leafy bits and just eating the roots.

I have since applied a good dosing of phosporus-and-potash-heavy fertiliser to the next batch of carrots to be pulled and will try and leave them a fortnight to put some bulk on. Here's hoping that the next lot are more like the first picture than the second.

On the bright side, I have rhubarb and therefore rhubarb crumble.

Tiny hands not shown for perspective in this picture, but they're a lot bigger than the carrots!

And rhubarb is technically a vegetable, so therefore I claim success.

I define my own victories.

PJW

Glory or scurvy awaits!

Last day where I can buy vegetables and I'm cooking a roast tonight to use up the last of everything in the house. It's a little bit worrying, as the garden is yet to conclusively be providing. I see salads in my future, as the lettuces are the only things producing reliably.

Windowsill lettuce! You are my only friend.

There is the promise of carrots, but I've had the promise of carrots before, only to discover that the massive great green heads are there because no energy has gone into growing the tasty orange bit. I'll be pulling them up tomorrow to either be elated at the bounties of the eart or distraught at the prospect of a month of pasta bakes and rice-based meals served with needle-thin carrottettes.

Schrodinger's Carrots - the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until it is pulled from the earth by its green leafy tops

Aside from that*, I'm vegetableless. The cauliflowers and cabbages haven't grown as quickly as expected and the mangetout that should be producing now is instead recovering from being mostly eaten by slugs. This month, I are to be mostly eating carrots.

I did have a few tempting thoughts of delaying the challenge for another month, or even calling the whole thing off with some comments about how silly I was being. However, I've put quite a bit of work and planning into this and I refuse to be thwarted in the first month. Needle-thin carrots for dinner it is, every night!

On the bright side, the new daylight bulb and reflector is working great. Due to the dim weather of late, the latest set of seedlings has been pretty much solely under artificial light and they're doing great. Much better than under the old system.

This is especially important as these are swedes for Oct/Nov, purple sprouting broccoli for Feb/Apr, chard for Nov-Jan, and kale and spinach for Jan-May. And pumpkins, just cause I can. Basically, this is the seed tray to make sure I'm not suffering from deficiency diseases** at the start of next year, even if I will be a bit tired of leafy green winter vegetables.

I'm off to go cook my last broccoli for 2 months and my last parsnips for 4 months and I guess we'll see the state of the carrots tomorrow. Wish me luck.

PJW

*Well, there's some new potatoes that won't get used tonight, which is kinda cheating, but I'm not going to throw them away on an arbitrary rule!
** On a side note, my daughter's food will be separate from this challenge if I do run short of vegetables!

Artificial sun, mk 2

About a month ago, I decided to adjust the reflector on my seedling sunlamp just a tiny little bit. Unfortunately, as you may recall, the reflector's build quality was typical of my construction work and was held together by sellotape, blu-tac, inertia and prayer.

The inevitable happened and I just managed to catch all the pieces before they destroyed my latest set of seedlings. Thankfully, my baby daughter was in bed at the time or she would've learned several new and interesting words.

It was at this point that my wife decided it was cruel to let me struggle on alone and offered her expertise. She designed and built for me this magnificient creation:

I don't think it looks that much sturdier than mine, do you?

Instead of being built from cardboard, wire and sellotape, this setup is built from hardboard, square dowel and metal fixings to hold it all together. More importantly, the reflector itself is supported from a base on the floor, rather than the previous method of having everything attached to the light fixture and creating a single point of failure.

So, this brand new and improved reflector was created, and that was of course the signal for the bulb to break. Massively annoying; it didn't even have the decency to break in some devastating fashion - the pin broke on the bayonet fitting. It still works, but it won't stay in the socket anymore.

However, that was the excuse I needed to buy another and buy bigger. The new bulb is 105W and kicks out 6800 lumen rather than the paltry 4300 lumen of the old one.

In laymans terms, it's gone from "Ow that hurts," to "AGGGHHH!" if you look directly into it.

Unfortunately, the month-long gap has not been kind to my seedlings. The best windowsill I have is still not particularly bright, as we're semi-detached and the south side of our house is the adjoining wall to the next one.

Up == Light, right? The carrots told us that was right.

The current seed tray is replacement cauliflowers for those lost, chard, tomatoes, peppers and a rather optimistic attempt at growing a globe artichoke plant from seed. None of them are particularly irreplaceable, but I'm really hoping that I don't have to start again.

With any luck, the extra power will be enough to rescue these ones and I can look at moving them outside next weekend.

PJW

April Update

Spring is sprung, in sort of a damp way, and the garden is thriving. I have nascent figs on my fig tree, the grape vines have come back to life and all around the garden, things are sprouting that I intended to sprout. I love this time of year - I'm always shocked that things are doing what they're supposed to and the miracle of food from the ground might be likely to happen again.

Not pictured - all the things that've been eaten by slugs/birds already.

One thing which hasn't gone to plan is to start relying solely on my own produce from May, which was part of the original terms of the challenge. The plan was to plant seedlings early and use the sunlamp to give them a headstart, which hasn't worked as well as I would've liked. I hoped for cabbage and carrots to tide me over, but the January carrots are very spindly still and the cabbages are still more promise than reality and while we could survive by just not eating any vegetables for a month and having loads of pasta, I feel that would be somewhat against the spirit of the rules!

Next May, I will have the overwintered cabbages, carrots, cauliflower and kale to feed us with, as well as a freezer's full of stored veg, so I've decided to push the challenge back to run from June to June instead.

That looks a lot more likely to happen - the first set of seedlings that I grew have mostly survived the transfer into the ground. I started with 3 broccoli, 3 cabbages, 7 cauliflowers and 3 brussels sprouts. Of those, only 3 cauliflowers and 1 brussels are pronounced dead yet, which is a pretty good hit rate for me.

If anyone's playing along at home, the best advice I ever received was to use bell cloches to protect vulnerable seedlings - these are basically miniature greenhouses which you place over the seedling so that light can get in, but cold winds and predators can't get in until the plant is big enough to look after itself. I've managed to make my own, shockingly enough out of empty Diet Coke bottles and they're doing a really good job of keeping my future meals alive.

A surviving cauliflower

The next exciting stage is when they stop looking like leafy things that may or may not die and start looking like miniature food. Hopefully, that'll be in the next few weeks.

PJW

Magical growing things

I love the first seedlings of the season. It's always amazing to me that any of my seeds come up at all; it still seems like magic to put a little ball into dirt and have that turn into a real live growing thing.

The carrots have developed a distinct sideways slant after having been kicked out from the sweet spot under the light by my new treasures. Sod them - they can grow or not, whatever. I've got cabbages on the go now!

Hopefully not how I'll treat my daughter if we ever make her a sibling.

That's like a real plant now. And it's not dead from lack of light. Go improvised sunlamp!

I now have all four cabbage seedlings growing, which is annoying cause the plan only called for two from this batch; I only planted four on the expectation that they wouldn't all come up. On the down side, only one of the six cauliflowers is showing its head and neither of the lettuces. This could be just a quirk of the seeds and the others will be up in a couple of days. It could also be that those seed packets are compromised and I need to get some more. Hard to tell and if I leave it too long then I won't be able to harvest for May, which will apparently be when I'll be eating nothing but cabbage.

I'll be planting the next batch of seeds tomorrow anyway and hopefully I'll get some more cauliflower from this batch.

PJW

More preparations and first sowings

The best news of the week is that the indoor carrots are not only surviving, but thriving.

Live! LIIIIIIVVVE!!!

All the sprouts are now pointing straight up, as opposed to desperately lunging sideways towards the window for sunlight. That suggests that the sunshine lamp is performing as planned, which means two successful experiments in one. Plus, the possibility of tasty early carrots, which is kinda the aim of the game.

Buoyed by the fact that the rain and wind have eased off somewhat and so we're unlikely to need to gather up two of every animal in the near future, I've spent most of the weekend preparing for the new growing season.

The garden is structured around four main 1.25m² growing beds, which will be used for brassica (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc) this year which need a lot of nitrogen for the leafy growth. I could have just piled a tonne of artificial fertiliser on, but I found out about green manure last winter and thought I'd give it a go. Green manure is a winter-growing crop that covers the ground, suppresses weeds and takes nitrogen out of the air and fixes it in the ground for the next year. Once winter is done, you chop it down, dig it into the ground and it provides the nutrients for the next year's crop.

Bit cruel when you think about it - a crop that you raise for the sole purpose of killing it and mutilating its body.

Incidentally, if anyone is going to be doing any gardening that involves weeding amongst plants or features, I can thoroughly recommend acquiring a Dutch Hoe. One of my father's mottos when it comes to DIY is that it's always best to take the time to get the right tool for the job, instead of trying to bodge it with the almost-right tool, as you'll just end up having to get the right tool later after wasting a load of time. The same appears true in gardening. Weeding those field beans would've taken me a half hour with a trowel, yet took three minutes with a hoe.

In terms of things to put in those beds, the first seeds of the season have been sown and are sitting atop the boiler. First up are early cauliflowers and cabbage, which should in theory be ready for May, when the no-buying-of-vegetables-for-a-calendar-year challenge* begins.

 I bought special plant labels this year. They're made of slate and you write on them with a wax pen that will only come off with white spirit. The idea is that they're impervious to water, which makes them perfect for being outside. Not quite so good for the idiot who doesn't have any white spirit in the house and requires three attempts to draw the diagram on. Thank god I was only doing one.

I had a couple of spaces in the seed tray which I've filled with lettuce for my next project - vertical gardening.

PJW

*Needs a better name.

Sometimes, I'm not that bright

My last post featured two things - indoor carrots that were struggling from lack of sunlight and couldn't go outside because of the bad weather, and the new sunlight lamp that I'd built to help my seedlings along.

Somehow, I didn't connect these two together until today.

In case anyone's interested in what leggy, undersunlighted seedlings look like, here's the carrots today. Hopefully they'll recover, while also providing a valuable test case to see if the sunlight lamp actually works.

Up == Light, right? Right?

I genuinely can't believe that I didn't realise this before.

PJW

The end of the world in fire and water

The first bit of news is that I have indoor carrots growing!

Need a magnifying glass? I swear they're there.

This is wonderful, as I'd given up on them and gives me the possibility that I may be able to harvest them at the start of April. However, this very much depends on the weather - the half of the experiment that was outside in the plastic greenhouse died a death due to the wind physically removing the greenhouse and tipping the pot over, so I think putting anything this small and fragile outside is asking for trouble while the UK weather forecast still reads "Götterdämmerung."

On the flip side, the plan had been only to keep them inside until they started sprouting, as they don't get much sunlight where they are. I think I'll make a decision after the weekend - given that the wind has managed to rip a wooden post out of a wall and bean me across the head with it; I'd like it to calm down before I put any of my new-grown treasures out in it.

Of course, the current weather also means that all of the preparation work that I spent last month doing for the vegetable garden is in danger of travelling to Oz and setting up a benevolent dictatorship there. The brassica net cages are wired very firmly onto walls, the bottom 6" is buried in the soil and there are bamboo canes acting as struts for all the corners. So far, only one of the four is still standing. I'm hoping the wires have broken, rather than the nets themselves.

I have managed to do one exciting bit of preparation indoors, which is the new seed trays for growing my vegetable seedlings, complete with a sunlight lamp.

Not pictured - the windpocalypse outside

 

Last year, I got a bit overexcited with the idea of planting seeds and started around this time of the year. I revelled in the little green sprouts, and made all sorts of detailed plans about when I was going to put them outside and then was well and truly scuppered by the fact that snow lasted all the way through March.

A valuable note about seedlings on windowsills - they're not very tolerant of not getting much light. A seedling's very simple idea of the world is up = light, light = up. Therefore, if I haven't enough light, then I need more up. There's no use explaining to them that up won't help and that light is hidden behind the horrible slate grey clouds and that they're already on the best windowsill in the house for what little light there is. I'd woken them up and they were going to keep growing till they had enough light dammit.

I ended up having to put the gangly poor things out of their misery when they reached 4 inches long and relied mostly on shop-bought seedlings that year.

This year, I'm hoping to cheat with technology. Indoor lighting normally does nothing for plants, as the light that they give off is a) too weak and b) the wrong colour, being tilted more towards the reds and yellows of the spectrum. This bulb gives 4300 lumen in the same light spectrum as the sun, which involves more blue light which is the one that plants photosynthesise from. In theory, in close proximity to the seedlings, it should be enough to help them alongside the sunlight from the window.

Building the lamp itself was a challenge - I started with a cheap clip-on socket for £2.99 and came up with the plan of clipping it to the window catch. This worked fine until the bulb arrived - it's about as long as my forearm and quite heavy. It wouldn't physically fit into the socket until I cut some of the plastic away and then when it did, it wasn't keen on staying horizontal without support.

One jury-rigged bracket from scrap wood later...

The reflector frame is made out of a wire coathanger, a cardboard box, tin foil, some gardening wire and prayer. There is no adjusting of it - it took me three hours and a great number of swear words to get it into place, and another hour after that to put it back together after I "just move this slightly"ed and the whole thing fell apart. It works though - the light is reflected back down with enough force that you don't want to look directly at it when it's on.

No doubt it will encourage my seedlings to grow beautifully, right up until the point it comes loose and crushes them like the hand of a temperamental deity.

The first seeds are sown next weekend - early cauliflower and cabbage. Looking forward to growing again.

PJW