What a weekend in my greenhouse!.
The good news is that I managed to really get sowing over Easter and have filled my greenhouse staging with pots and pots of sown seeds.
There’s everything from perennial flowers, annuals and a whole host of vegetables and salads, all enveloped in fine seed compost and gently watered in. I like to stand the pots on capillary matting on self-watering trays, but this early in the season I don’t fill the trays with water, as the compost gets too wet and attracts fungus flies. Instead I gently water the pots with tepid water every other day depending on the weather.
So now the bad news! You may remember I told of how my elderly cat loves to bask in the sunshine in the summer greenhouse, sneaking in through the windows and lazing on a beanbag. Well I decided a while back to wash the beanbag cover as it was coated in cat fur. I didn’t put it back on, preferring to keep it clean for a while, so the inner bag of beans was left safely resting on a chair.
On Good Friday when I ventured into the greenhouse I could hear a funny noise. First of all I thought it was a wasp munching on wood or paper to make its nest. I’d seen a Queen wasp fly into the greenhouse a week or so ago, so I must admit I was keeping an eye out for her house building activities. Then I tracked down the noise, a fine stream of polystyrene balls was falling from the beanbag into a heap in the corner. Perhaps a mouse had chewed a hole in the bag? No such luck!! The inner bag had started to degrade and was disintegrating before my eyes and every time I touched it, the holes multiplied and got bigger and bigger and more and more beans kept pouring out.
They are so tiny and so static that they were everywhere, every nook and cranny and they kept on coming. In fact I might well have been buried in the blessed things. Grabbing a large woven bag that had once held a special delivery I managed to capture over half of the offending beads, which left about half a million all over the place, and I’m not exaggerating. So guess what I spent the rest of the weekend doing? Yep, capturing every single last polystyrene bead and bagging it up so that it never escapes again. Aaaarrrggghhhh.
And if that wasn’t enough I later found the Queen wasp. She had hidden herself away between two parts of a seedling propagator I was trying to clean. I wondered why they wouldn’t come apart and when they did I was greeted by the large and rather scary head of HRH Wasp who was definitely not amused.
Needless to say I ran out the greenhouse with a yelp, swiftly followed by Queenie and I managed to shut the door behind her. Phew. I need a week off now to recover!
