Tea In The Sahara

A pea seedling in a module in the polytunnel, basking in the sunshine

Right now Wales seems to think it's the Sahara and is wildly oscillating between hot days and freezing nights. Last night the temperature on my land was 0.8 degrees C and there was a ground frost. This afternoon I got a suntan as I planted out my first lettuce seedlings into the soil, the sun blazing down in a wide blue sky, the temperature rocketing up to over 16 degrees C. (OK, not exactly the Sahara then.)

Keeping all my baby vegetable plants happy in these conditions is not easy. The polytunnel, where most of them are kept in their plastic modules, can get much hotter than outside, especially if both ends were closed. But during the freezing night the temperature plummets in the tunnel too so closing the doors an hour before sunset does help a bit to keep the heat in.

A very young chard seedling

If I happen to be away even for a day when the weather's doing this and leave the polytunnel closed, the plants would get stressed, their compost dries out and they may never recover. So I'm doing my best to ensure I'm there every morning to open it up, and then in the evening around 6pm everything gets a good dowsing of water and I close it up again.

Having a “hot bed” in there, a large crate full of fresh manure, must retain a bit of the day's heat as the icy darkness descends, but only the seedlings on top of it will benefit. I have a few transparent hard plastic covers that when placed over a module tray offer a little bit of extra protection.

Those tadpoles are encouraging the frogspawn to emerge. Or they're eating it, hard to tell 

Yet even so the broad bean plants in the tunnel seem to have suffered from the cold night - the tips of some of them have gone a little bit black. The 34 tomato seedlings are thankfully still safe and sound at Anna's house, growing a bit “leggy” by the window sill but not suffering the biting cold of night. 

Let's hope Wales figures out soon it isn't a big African desert but a damp, cloudy and temperate northern country. (Rain forecast on Sunday so I'm sure it'll be service as usual again!)

Insects are out now. This one checks out the pollen of my flowering kale plants