Emma Cooper

I started my gardening hour inside this morning, cleaning the windows in my office. I use the windowsill in there to overwinter plants and start off seedlings (it faces north, so is far less scorching than my south-facing bedroom windowsill) and over time mould and grime builds up until you can’t see out of the window. Not good for the plant, or me, so it’s now all nice and clean.

That led me on to looking after some of the plants that live there. I have a spider plant (which has grown some since that photo was taken). It had become so pot-bound that it had pushed itself out of its pot. There as no soil left, and the roots coming out of the bottom were so tangled I had to cut the pot off to remove it. Several stems of babies were hanging in mid-air, but one had rooted directly into the gravel in the bottom of the tray. I repotted the mother, and potted up the rooted baby and put it in Pete’s office. It should improve the air quality for him and prove to be almost unkillable – Pete has a tendency to dispose of matches by pushing them into the compost. Houseplants under his ‘care’ have to have a strong will to live.

The rest of the babies I pushed into various nooks around the garden, to see if they would survive the summer as bedding plants. They surely can’t find life harsher outside (where it rains) than suspended above a mother plant that was hardly ever watered.

While I was wandering around and poking the spider plants into holes I discovered some plants that were badly wilting, so watering was next on the agenda. Rain is forecast for this evening, though, so I didn’t go too nuts.

About three weeks ago I started a brown button mushroom kit. It seems to be making progress, so today I started a white mushroom kit. I realise now that this kind of mushroom kit will be made with peat, so I won’t be buying any more, but I bought these last year and they need using. You get a layer of spawny straw-like material and a packet of compost ‘casing’ that needs mixing with water before you spread it over the top. With the lid back on the kit sits somewhere warm (my office) for a week or to encourage the mycelium to grow, then somewhere cooler (the Futility Room_ to encourage the mushrooms to appear. This is the theory – I have had limited success in the past due to the attentions of fungus gnats. I will have to wait and see, but I am also trying to establish various types of mushrooms in the garden, and those are completely peat-free.

I spent my last few minutes potting up my toothache plant seedlings. I potted up the largest seven and tipped the rest into one of the potato pots – I’m gradually earthing them up with the spent compost from other things. Actually I have left them outside; I must go and fetch them back in out of the wind.