The wine widow on being practical, shattered greenhouses and the ‘f’ word (April/May)
I have only done one really practical thing in my life which is when I sucked a Hama bead out of our son’s left nostril using a straw. He was 2. That I mention this quite often, 19 years later, is because that Hama bead is my proudest moment as a mother, a little beacon of common sense in an otherwise pretty arid landscape, which may explain why I thought a bird had crashed into the greenhouse and a vandal had sprinkled concrete powder around the veg beds.
When I noticed that the tomato and salad seedlings were covered in shards of glass, it took me a moment to look up and realise that the end of the greenhouse looked like an old fashioned windscreen, shattered from top to toe.
Shards of glass continued to drop as I moved around so I went outside to look for a potential culprit - a dead bird on the ground. I walked round paths that were peculiarly greyish white. On closer inspection I identified a layer of dandelion fluff such as I’d never seen. I sent photos to Zam. Willow he declared. And the greenhouse… well it was possible that a tiny stone had been thrown up by his mowing, unnoticed by us the evening before but creating a dink, which later shattered.
I was incredibly nice about it. Because just for once ….
It has however left the seedlings we are not going to eat - the salad and tomatoes have been binned - vulnerable to frost. And it’s all about the F word this week because following that little heatwave, the temperature is falling and a polar air mass is coming. As he keeps saying while watching the weather app 24 hours a day. I wouldn’t dream of mentioning the tomatoes.
