This week has been very productive, my husband and I used all our inventive skills and created a small but very effective greenhouse for the plants that need heat (in our case thats chillies, peppers, aubergines and melons). We had a spare black recycling box from the council (ours was stolen, then found days later, but in the meantime the council had thrown a new one at our front down - literally thrown), so we filled this with bits of rounded off glass that we’ve been collecting from the beach for some time, then put the seed trays on top. We had a couple of A frames (not sure of their original use possibly for a paste table), so we used one of those and rested it on top. Over this we put a polythene bag - we used one of those bags that you put clothes in then suck out the air with a vacuum because we had one that had ripped when we moved house. We covered up the gaps with bubble wrap and made sure we could remove it all to deal with the plants as necessary and voila! A minature greenhouse. I like it so much I’ve decided I need at least another two. But there is the question of finding a similar sized black box as the recycling boxes. In the meantime for the rest of the plants that need a bit of heat, we’ve just been wrapping them in bubblewrap (including right over the top of the plant pot until they germinate) which works a treat. Still haven’t managed to get any chillies to germinate though.
Making stuff out of old junk is great fun, I really enjoy it and really enjoy using my ingenuity to prevent things being thrown away. I certainly think everyone should do it. There is a great site called Recycle This! which gives some great ideas on how to reuse items you might normally put in the bin.
Went for a forage today but forgot to take my gardening gloves so whilst I found a great source of nettles far away from traffic pollution and dog pee I couldn’t pick any. Got attacked by plenty of brambles though. Also found some Ground Ivy but only took a little bit to press in my book for future reference, have no recipes for it yet.
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