prima vera

My greenhouse at the moment gladdens my heart.  When I open the door I am greeted with the humming fug of growing plants.  Many of them now no longer need their little plastic propagator lids, and are stretching boldly out of the earth.  I am fascinated by the power of the nascent plant that is within the seed to push its way out of its husk into the earth, then out of the earth into the air, just from the encouragement of warmth and water. 

I have 100 percent germination of my potimarron and mini red turban squashes.  I am delighted because these are the squashes I fell in love with in a French auberge in the summer.  The mini red turban in particular is a fabulous vegetable, beautiful because of its irregularities.
 

The broad bean seeds I kept from the delicious broad beans I cropped last year have all germinated.  I also have success with my peas and other squashes.  The dwarf French bean Royalty has not been so successful.  All the seeds germinated, but half of them are sad brown mutants.  I can't work out what went wrong.  They may have got scorched by the sun as they first sprouted from the soil, but none of the other seedlings has been affected.  I may write to the RHS My Garden forum about it. 

There is no sign of germination of my very hot chilli seeds - 'Ring of Fire'.  This is very sad, because I killed off the first lot of wonderfully healthy seedlings by leaving them outside for the frost to do its worst.  It's now too late to sow more.  My brother posesses the last surviving seedling, so hopefully his will thrive to make up for it all. 

The biggest surpise for me is that the honeydew melon seeds have germinated.  They were just seeds from a melon that had been discarded in a compost heap.  I must have got the conditions just right in the greenhouse without even trying.  I am glad that something that was thrown away has been given the chance of life.