I've assembled a small 2 shelf staging stand for my mother this afternoon. It took me the best part of 2 hrs! Some of the reason for it taking so long was I'd missed something in the not so clear instructions and near the end of assembly, I found a part was upside down – I had to undo a fair bit to correct this. Still, I think its green coated aluminium looks good and (unlike the wooden one replaced – they never seem to last that long) should last and mother is happy.
I only got round to getting the heated propogator out yesterday. I'm letting the compost warm up first but I'll (at last…) get the peppers (Topepo Rosso – a sweet pimento type – I do better with these than bell peppers) and aubergines (Hansel – on of the types you can pick small and is well suited to our small greenhouses) in tomorrow.
We bought a printer to print laminated labels mostly (I've a few other things I want to use it for) with gardening in mind. We also got some plastic sticks to go in plant pots, to suit the 12mm tape. I've only just worked out the cost. 7p per stick and if I'm to guess the average length of tape used per label is 40mm, around 7p worth of tape. So 14p per labelled stick. Some of the sticks will be reused though and we'll switch to “compatible” tape (Amazon has some in packs of 5 at £3 per cartridge compared to the £13 we paid for one genuine Brother cartridge) in future.
It won' be that long now before my windowsill and the porch are full of plants waiting to go out to the greenhouses – I aim for 1st May for that. We only buy small packs (say avg 10-20 seeds) of seeds and I usually plant the whole packets where (eg. with the Ailsa Craig and Roma tomatoes for the greenhouse) I may only want 4-6 plants. There always seems to be people who will eg. be happy to take a couple of spare tomato plants.