The Weather, the Glass, the New Greenhouse

 Is it me, or is this weather driving anyone else absolutely round the bend?

Because here's the thing. Last week — last week — I was out in a t-shirt. The sun was cracking the flags, the birds were singing, I was standing on the allotment feeling like a man who had everything worked out. Warm days. Decent light. A general sense that spring had finally, properly arrived and that we were all going to be absolutely fine. I may have even smiled at a stranger. That's how good it was.

And then. Well. Then the weather apparently looked at itself in the mirror, had a little think, and decided that wasn't the vibe after all. Because this week we have had wind, we have had rain, we have had temperatures dropping to two degrees at night. Two. Degrees. That's not spring. That's November in a hat. Sara and me have been out covering seedlings in fleece like I'm tucking in a ward full of very small, very cold patients, and I'll be honest with you — I'm starting to question whether the fleece is doing as much good as my faith in it.

The hardening off situation has got completely out of hand, and I'm going to be straight with you about why — because it wasn't entirely a plan. Some of those plants went outside because they were ready. And some of them went outside because the greenhouse was full. That's the honest truth. When you've got two allotments worth of seedlings on the go, and a greenhouse that's doing a passable impression of a rush hour bus, eventually something has to move out whether it's ready or not. It's not ideal. It's not something you'll read in a gardening book. But it's real life, and real life on the allotment doesn't always match what it says on the seed packet.

The seedlings themselves are the most frustrating part. They're alive. They're there. They just don't seem to want to move. You look at them in the morning and you look at them in the evening and you'd be hard pressed to swear that anything has happened in between. The average night temperature this week came in around four degrees, and four degrees — as any seedling will tell you if it could talk, which would be marvellous and also terrifying — is simply not warm enough to keep things ticking along properly. Everything below about eight degrees and you're basically asking them to hold on, stand still and wait. Which is what they're doing. Standing still and waiting. Like a queue at a post office. Lots of effort, no visible progress.

I keep reminding myself that they will catch up. Once the weather settles and the temperatures come up, they will absolutely motor. I've seen it before — a week of cold and stall, then the sun comes out and suddenly everything looks three times the size it did on Monday. It's like they were saving it all up. The allotment teaches you patience whether you want to learn it or not, and I have been on the receiving end of that lesson more times than I can count. So we wait. We cover with fleece. We peer at them hopefully every morning. And we wait a bit more.

But now — and here's where this week gets interesting, because there has been a bright spot, and it is an extremely good-looking bright spot — we have finished the new greenhouse.

I want you to appreciate what this means. The new greenhouse is done. Assembled. Standing up. Black, beautiful, all clean lines and fresh glass and a staging arrangement that I am genuinely rather proud of. It looks absolutely brilliant. I've wanted it up for a while and this week, with Sara — who is officially now listed in my records as chief labourer — we got the last of it finished and it looks the part.

Now. I have to tell you about the glass. Because this story is not entirely without incident, and it wouldn't be a proper update from me if something hadn't gone slightly sideways.

Sara was inside doing the dinner. I was finishing off. I was — and I want to be clear that I am a careful man, a measured man, a man who has pulled small engines apart and reassembled them without losing his mind — I was being careful. And I still managed to break one of the panes. Just the one. Just enough. One moment it was a pane of greenhouse glass, minding its own business, and the next moment it wasn't. I won't go into the exact details of how it happened because I'm not entirely sure it reflects well on me, but what I will say is that the sound glass makes when it meets a hard surface is one of those sounds that goes right through you. Right through. You don't need to look. You know.

Sara, to her eternal credit, said nothing. Which was either very kind or very wise, and probably both. The look from the window, just to see I was ok.

So — another bit of expense. Which is fine. Which I am completely at peace with. Which I have stopped mentioning. The staging was already finished earlier in the week, which was a satisfying job in itself — I like a greenhouse with proper staging, somewhere to put things at the right height, somewhere that looks organised and purposeful even when the growing season is making me feel anything but. We moved a lot of the potted on plants across to the new greenhouse today, the ones that need more light, and I think they're going to be much happier in there. More space. Better light. Room to breathe. Exactly what I needed a few weeks ago myself, if I'm honest.

The old greenhouse hasn't been emptied, mind you. We're not at that stage. Right now both greenhouses are working hard and I'm working around them, which in practice means a lot of shuffling things from one bench to another and occasionally saying words under my breath that I wouldn't want Iris to hear.

Speaking of Iris — she's been up when the weather allowed, and she's good. Sam too, when he can get there. It's been a slow week allotment wise, no point in pretending otherwise. The weather saw to that. You can have all the enthusiasm in the world and all the plans drawn up on paper and all the compost in the world heaped and ready, but when the wind is blowing sideways and it's four degrees and the rain hasn't read the calendar and doesn't know it's supposed to be spring — you pick your battles. This week we picked fewer battles than I would have liked.

But we are ready. That's the thing. That's what I keep coming back to. The new greenhouse is up. The staging is in. The plants are covered and waiting and quietly building themselves up for the moment the weather makes up its mind. The seeds are sown. The ground is prepared. Everything is sitting there like a coiled spring — and when the weather finally commits to something warmer, when we get a proper settled spell, it will be all go. Everything at once. The kind of week where you fall into bed at the end of it and you're absolutely done and you wouldn't swap it for anything.

That week is coming. I can feel it.

In the meantime, there's a pane of glass to replace, a fleece rota to maintain, and a greenhouse full of plants that are having a very quiet think about whether they're ready to get on with things yet.

So are we all, to be fair. So are we all.

Keep digging.