Greenhouse massacre!

I mentioned a few weeks back that whilst we were dismantling the fruit cages, I decided to save the standard redcurrant and move it round to the kitchen courtyard.  As usual I didn't take a photo at the time but here it is in it's new home.  Mind you, I don't think it was too happy to be uprooted and plonked in a pot, albeit a large one, because soon after I took said photo it dropped all its leaves 😒 I'm hoping it's only a temporary sulk and that it will perk up again next spring!

Coming back to more recent garden tasks, not only was I working my way round the hedge border in the ornamental front garden, I also had to be ruthless in the greenhouse last week too 😦  

Before we went south, the tomatoes were finally starting to fruit but we'd had only a handful actually ripen.

The sweet peppers were even further behind!  The cucumbers, to be fair though, have been pretty productive.

So it was all pretty "jungly" in there before we went away, but when we got back most of the leaves of the Orangeto tomatoes were yellow, wilting, and spotty.  The Summerlast leaves, though, were perfectly fine!  I decided drastic measures were called for so I stripped off all the manky foliage leaving some very sorry-looking tomato plants in my wake 😏 I also took off a fair few of the leaves from the Summerlast plants in the hope that the fruits would have more access to the light to help them ripen. 

By last week the cucumbers were just about finished but I've been happy with the harvest from the two plants.  As for the sweet peppers, well I don't know if I will attempt to grow them again ~ not from plug plants anyway, as by the time they are despatched I just seem to run out of growing time.  The same is true of the tomatoes, to be honest, so I think that next year I may gird me loins and try from seed so that I can sow earlier in the season.

Nothing much was happening with the tomatoes by last week either, so I decided to be even more ruthless!  I stripped the leaves totally from the Summerlast plants; it remains to be seen whether the fruit will ripen any further.

As for the Orangeto, I felt there wasn't any point in keeping the fruit on the plants so I stripped them totally 😏  There were a lot of fruits on the plants, as well as more flowers, but I kept only the larger ones.  They are now in a tub on the kitchen worktop and are finally starting to ripen.  I will probably pick the Summerlast fruits soon and bring them indoors too, as it won't be long before I need space in the greenhouse for the plants I want to try to overwinter again this year!