Greenhouse Carbooting!

Wow, what a difference this weekend was from last weekend (weather wise I mean), it was beautiful and sunny, even dare I say it, hot here in Bath.

My parents were visiting this weekend, (sadly not many pics, my Father has a Ninja like ability to hide when even a camera is whipped out!) anyway seeing as I had 2 unsuspecting victims I pressed them into action helping us clean out the greenhouse, which had got to the point where it was hard to get through the door, plus the Russian Vine Weed (also know as Bind Weed) which plagues our garden, was taking over in there and needed sorting out.

We invested in some weed matting and several bags of pea gravel, which was laid down after we had taken all the rubbish out (my god there was a lot of rubbish, where the hell did all that come from?!), this was then covered by the pea gravel, giving me a good surface for my tomato pots to sit on (and hopefully slow done the damned Vine Weed). Rich gave all the windows a good wash down, I hadn't realized how dirty it was was until I saw the colour of the water he was using.







Sunday morning I badgered everyone out of bed at 7.30 to go carbooting with me, Bath has a brilliant weekly carboot, running from Easter weekend till about October, every Sunday and Bank holiday Monday morning (weather permitting of course) up on Lansdown racecourses, its usually pretty big and treasures can be found on a regular basis! By far the best thing about the carboot is the huge amount of people selling plants, most of our veg, fruit and flowers are from here (and Morrison's) another great thing is the sellers are usually willing to haggle if your buying a few plants (I love this!). Yesterday was another huge success on the bargain hunting front:



We got a yellow Broom, a pretty blue plant who's name escapes me, two Hot Peppers, two Moneymaker tomatoes, one Harbinger tomato and one basket tomato and an enamel stew pot, all for the grand total of £8! I almost always end up buying my tomato's from carboots, usually because they are so cheap and because I always forget to sow my own (third year in a row I've forgotten to buy seeds!)

I have just this minuet looked up Harbinger Tomatoes on Google, apparently their pretty hard to find these days but have a really good flavour! Wow that's was lucky, I brought this one and a little Moneymaker of some really old guy who only had the two tomato plants left and only wanted 80p for the two, I didn't want to leave the little Harbinger all on its own so I had to take both of them home to our nice clean greenhouse.



Last year I tried growing my tomatoes in plastic pots filled with grow bag compost on the advice of my Granddad Joe, it worked really well, so I will be doing the same again this year, I have planted some Basil seeds in the pots with the tomatoes too, apparently they are great companion plants and really encourage each other to grow, also Basil is a vital ingredient in my home made tomato soup so I will be need lots of it!
I'm also on the look out for some way of keeping them well watered, I tried a drip feed irrigation system attached to one of the water butts last year but I couldn't get it to work very well, it either flooded the plants or decided to stop working altogether, so I need something a bit more reliable this year, this may require some interwed research I think!

So I manged to get loads done with quite a bit of help (thanks Mum, Dad & Rich!), our greenhouse is now looking like a proper working greenhouse again and not a see though shed!