GARDENING The perils of spring planting

A RIOT OF COLOUR ?Venetia McEllin’s garden in late May.

The perils of spring planting


Gardening
Venetia McEllin

Growing plants from seed in your greenhouse and carefully nurturing them until they are big enough to be planted out can be one of the most rewarding of gardening jobs. You never really know how they will turn out - but that’s half the fun. Of course, you need to harden off your babies in a cold frame or warm corner for a week or so, but then if the weather decides to revert to cold wet and windy conditions, you have a dilemma.
For example where do you plant your tomatoes if the greenhouse is still full of plants?   Canny gardeners will tell you not to plant out until the end of May, but I always have this urge to spring clean the greenhouse and fill up my empty flower beds before I should, often with disastrous results.  
Take this year. I had as usual started sowing before the recommended time - this never works since the trays of seeds just sit and sulk until conditions are suitable for them to wake up - but I never learn.
I sowed zinnia red spider, a beautiful delicate flower with a dark stem and small red petals; I also planted several varieties of cornflower, cosmos, rudbeckia, ladybird poppy, tithonia torch which is a lovely orange mexican sunflower, a few lovely deep ruby velvet queen sunflowers, an echinops seed head and several types of sweet pea. I had also taken cuttings of lupin masterpiece which is a fantastic purple colour and cuttings of my delphinium pacific blue (another stunner) and salvia amistrad. So my 6 x 8 greenhouse was literally bursting at the seams!
We had planned a holiday in Portugal in mid-May and I optimistically expected all my seeds to be vigorous plants by then and the weather perfect for planting out before we went away.  Unfortunately we had that weird ‘hot one day and arctic the next’ weather which left me with a problem - to plant out or not to plant out. In the end I hedged my bets. I planted some out, put some in a raised bed and got friend Helen to babymind the rest in her polytunnel.

Shrivelled
Well, my zinnias shrivelled up outside and my ladybird poppies shrank into the ground. The slugs had a field day with my sunflowers and some white larkspur which I had grown from seed were definitely  less perky than when I planted them. So really I gained nothing by planting out before the weather had settled.
Things fared better in the raised bed and my cornflowers and coreopsis didn’t seem to mind the bad weather. Since I’ve decided that veg growing is not for me (except for tomatoes cucumbers and soft fruit) I am now going to keep a raised bed especially for flowers. They are much easier to keep an eye on and not so likely to be eaten by slugs.  Also  they don’t have to compete with other plants or weeds. You can then transplant them to bare spots in the flower bed at a later stage.
I am sure my impatience to plant things out early is because I want to see the flower beds with flowers in them and not bare earth.  But I shouldn’t have bothered - when we got back from Portugal, the flower beds had magically transformed themselves. Perennials, which had spent the winter underground, had leapt into life - aquilegias, those large blowsy poppies, delphiniums and lupins, blue centaurea and lots more are now all flowering happily without any assistance from me! Now where am I going to put all my greenhouse grown plants?

Venetia McEllin is a member of Ballinrobe Garden Club, which meets on the first Tuesday of the month at 7.30pm in Tacú Resource Centre, Ballinrobe.