It has been such a lovely day today! After all this glum – suddenly bright and sunny and warm.

I erected a new set of shelves for the greenhouse. A while back I purchased 4 smaller greenhouses – all plastic construction – very cheaply and I use the frames and shelves as shelving inside my large greenhouse, rather than as greenhouses themselves.

Today I planted the melons. I set seed for:

HONEYDEW: Collective Farm Woman. Ukrainian heirloom variety once feared as lost, but found again cultivated on a collective farm, hence the name. Smooth, round fruit 18-20cm across with yellowish white, highly fragrant & sweet flesh. Early to mature. Ideal for cooler climates although well suited to all areas. 80-85 days

ROCKMELON: (Cantaloupe)

Blenheim (for the palace!!). Heirloom dating back to 1881. Medium, thin skinned fruit with excellent flavour. Does well in cool, short season climates. 80-90 days.

French Charentais. Heirloom first introduced in 1787. Small melon to 1kg with sweet, thick, deep-orange, flesh, and small seed cavity. Flesh has deep, aromatic, flowery aroma. Sought after variety. Disease resistant. Best suited to cooler areas. 90 days.

Prescott Fond Blanc. French heirloom dating back prior to 1850. Highly attractive, flattened, heavily ribbed fruit with warts & bumps. Salmon orange flesh with grey-green skin turning straw yellow when ripe. Rich flavour when harvested ripe. Highly fragrant. Approx. 8 fruit per vine. Drought tolerant. 100 days.

I am looking forward to these! I have put their pots on the highest shelf in the greenhouse where hopefully they will do well. :)

The carrots are up. The warthog pumpkins are up. The fennel is up. The celeraic is up. Everything remains verrrry tiny, but is *is* coming up.

Seth.

Oh, and a small piece of sickness to report. Seth has had to go to hospital. *weeps* Seth is one of my clocks (yeah, I know, other people have lives …). All of my clocks have names. Anyway, Seth is a mid-nineteenth century railway clock that lives in my bedroom. Yes, he booms. No, I don’t care, ‘coz I am mostly deaf. :) Seth’s hands got stuck a few days ago and when I tried to fix him his heart stopped. Good thing I don’t have kids, huh? Imagine me arriving at Emergency with a heart-stopped child in my arms, trying to explain that I was windmilling his arms as they seemed to be stuck when his heart gave out. Not a good scenario. I could see serious jail time over that one.

So I took Seth down to the local clockmaker to fix. The local clockmaker lives in this tiny, totally delightful Georgian cottage. He really ought to sell sweets from it. Once we’d had a long discussion of Seth’s problems, I was saying my goodbyes while struggling with the front door (delightful or not, it needs to have a shoulder put to it and a sharp kick in the right place so that it will open), when the clockmaker says laconically, “Your garden’s looking good.”

Ha! So much for anonymity!