Lessons learned

As they had just about finished, on Sunday I cleared out the tomato plants from my greenhouse. Because it was my first year of greenhouse growing I got a little too enthusiastic and as I've mentioned in previous posts filled the greenhouse with enough tomato plants to fill a small Heinz factory!

Even their last effort has produced a carrier bag full of red and green offerings that are heading for my first ever batch of tomato ketchup.

During the course of the clearing however I learned the following things:

1. A greenhouse entirely full of tomatoes and nothing else is not necessarily a good idea. When one has grown them, a home is then needed for them!

2. Nature is untidy. Those pretty little tomato plants were neat when I planted them but became sprawling behemoths as the summer went on. Perhaps less plants might have helped. See point 1.

3. Nature is messy. The tomatoes that fell off their stalks attracted all sorts of wildlife who half chomped them and left the rest for me to clean up. Unfortunately because of the size the tomato plants grew to I could not reach many of them and they went mouldy. See point 2.

and most importantly:

4. Spiders like greenhouses. Or to put more clearly - very large spiders indeed like greenhouses!

My ability to relax in my greenhouse has been shattered forever. Who said they could move in?