Even more mess

I can only dream of having such a neat and tidy greenhouse like the one above, even though I say to myself every year that I will make sure it's all spick and span in there before winter sets in 😏

Naturally this last winter has been no exception, and my poor greenhouse spent months in disarray!

However, despite my failure with the dahlias, I did remember to bring some of last year's "summer bedding" into the greenhouse, to see if I could overwinter it successfully. 

Whilst they were sold as bedding plants, they are in fact tender perennials ~ well, certainly they are up here in Orkney ~ hence my overwintering experiment.

Some of the plants weren't rescued in time but even though it is an unheated space, a fair few spent the winter quite happily in there.

I also brought in some strawberry plants that I wanted to move but didn't yet have the bed ready to move them to.

I thought that these two fuchsias were going to die, but they settled down and steadily put on new growth.

This fella even put out flowers!

Some of my messiness problem is that the potting bench is too high for me to work at whilst sitting on my little stool ~ but standing for too long really makes my back ache.  So I've been improvising by resting my enamel bowl in a plant pot, which I then had to balance on the container of chicken manure pellets in an attempt to raise it up somewhat!  It was in fact still a little too low and the bending forward wasn't stopping my back from aching either ~ plus I kept spilling compost on the floor 😖

Why it hasn't occurred to me before now to move the bloody potting tray to the lower-but-not-too-low staging I have absolutely no idea 😳

This works so much better than my Heath Robinson set-up, as I'm sure you can imagine!  I've had a proper tidy-up in the greenhouse now, because it was really getting on my nerves to see the mess every time I went in there.  Another prompt was that I needed to get Laura's ctenanthe divided and repotted, and that really wasn't going to happen with the bucket-and-bowl configuration LOL

These are this year's greenhouse crops.

The three cucumbers, Party Time, are looking happier since I put them in larger pots. The sweet peppers are Sweetonia Chocolate.  I lost one of them and was a bit concerned that the remaining two looked a bit peaky.  Now that they have gone into larger pots, they too are looking much happier.

Adrian had to pot up the tomatoes for me, as they arrived whilst I was down south with my Dad.  There are two varieties, Summerlast and Orangeto, and I bought them as packs of three super plugs from Marshalls.  I potted them on when I came back home and two of the Orangetos were in fact two little plants, so I split them and now have five!