I spent yesterday with my 12 & 1/2 year old daughter , washing & sterilizing the glasshouse . two washes inside , two washed outside using s ver soft extending car shampoo brush and a killer spray loaded with a dessert spoon of green fairy wash up liquid , half a cup of Domestos bleach & 5 litres of water , it's had and several rinses in between the washes .
The floor got a final rinse & light brushing over with a solution of an eggcup full & Vircon S in clean water in the hope that it should kill all viruses and kill the green slime spores .
Munchkin has been taken camping & leisure gear shopping by Alison as a reward for her hard work .
The overly wet winter saw it produce green frothy slime on the floor , having had it set on a 6 inch thick cast concrete base that was 1& 1/2 to 1 & 3/4 inches dropped at one corner didn't help either. For the rain just ran in on the inside where the panes of glass were 1/4 of an inch unseated at the lower edge ..so much for professional landscapers who are supposed to be experienced glasshouse erectors.
Before we washed , scrubbed and disinfected it I undid all the anchor points I'd put in , then carefully slid spades & forks under the metal foundation /edge strip , levered down to raise the frame and slipped in 14 , 2 x 2 " squares of different thicknesses of plastic chopping boards to make packing shims to level up the darn thing.
It's still got a 1/5 inch hump midway along the worst gutter , fortunately all the glass has worked it's way down /across to be fully seated in the channels due to me using the soap , a soft brush & big power washer , none of it has cracked or shattered.
Today I spent a few hours sorting things in and around the garage , then got down to making up my bottomless grow tubes up and filling them with fine sieved home made compost ( mainly house hold veg , waste paper & animal manures ) , composted coconut fibres and sedge peat .
I filled 96 , 70 mm tall x 1 & 1/2 DIA round tube and 30 x 2 x 2 square tubes x 70 mm tall , then put them in water tight trays & flooded the trays so that over tonight & tomorrow they will soak up all the water to give the seeds a decent wetting /start to life.
The 2 x2 " square tubes will be for the bigger seeds all tubes will be sown as individual seeds if possible .
Some of the sown seeds will go direct into the glass house on staging other will go into the headed UV bed or the heated misting bed in the glass house .
As soon as the hot bed seeds germinate and show a tiny bit of greenery they will be taken off the heat and put on the glasshouse staging which is covered in black pond liner to attract the suns heat and encourage better plant growth .
I'm going to be soaking my beans & peas in a few minutes when I stop playing on the site.
Tomorrow I'll be washing and removing any writing from all of last years seed labels ready for sowing thing on Thursday
It usually takes a good hour & a half to do this simple task , but I'd rather use my own really long lasting labels instead of buying new ones each year . Some of my home made labels are almost 25 years old & still white and going strong . .
Slugs .....
I'm going to be using slug nematodes again this year to stop them eating plants both in the glasshouse and in all my raised beds & to treat some made up potting composts and newly made well composted manures .
If I can get this lot slug nematode infected things should be much better all round .
I ordered a two session pack for 40 sq mtrs yesterday .... first pack is due here tomorrow and the last one in six weeks time.
OK it costs £20 for the dual pack from " Plants by Post " ( cheapest place I can find ).
When you consider I was using five or six big containers of slug killer every yearas almost everytime it rained hard it needed doing again . At £ 4.50 or so a pop you can see where I'm coming from , the nematode control is put on from a watering can once & lasts six weeks or longer.
I can't speak too highly of the nematode controls this year , so far there is very little evidence of any slugs.
Dan told me that after a few years of him using it, it appears to have a residual effect in propagating it's own replacements.
Bert ,
The strawberries have finally started to come alive and are about 1 & 1/2 times bigger than when you sent me them.
Topic: What's going on? (Read 7710 times)
