God I love growing our own

[Amari]

For clarity, I assume you're interested in achieving relatively high temperatures as a means of killing off any viable seeds in the compost?

James

Yes

 

[JamezF]

With dinner tonight we ate the last of our fresh cherry tomatoes. I'm genuinely amazed that they've lasted this long. I harvested them some weeks back when they were green and we've just been picking the ripe ones out to eat ever since.

James

 

[JamezF]

Weirder and weirder, said Alice...

These are the pepper plants in the polytunnel, earlier today.

All looking a bit sorry for themselves. I'd have removed them already if I'd had time.

On the other hand, these are the plants in Frankenstein's greenhouse, also earlier today, whilst I was replacing the pane of glass that fell victim to Storm Darragh.

Obviously I'm going to leave them to see if they make it all the way through the Winter. It's hard to believe such a thing might be possible the way things have been this year, who knows? It is tempting to make a little frame so I can drape some fleece over the top of them to give a bit more protection from frost, I have to admit. I was going to line the greenhouse with bubblewrap this Autumn, but ran out of, well, everything, really.

James

 

[Penninetrader]

Time the shortest of commodities

 

[JamezF]

First day of a new year so despite the rain and gloom I've been outside in the veggie plot. Mostly just to do some watering in the polytunnel/greenhouses, but as temperatures are forecast to plummet to something vaguely approximating "normal for Winter" over the next few days I've been putting a load of fleece over the pepper plants in Frankenstein's greenhouse. They're still resolutely hanging in there and I'd love to see them make it through the rest of the Winter now. I might whack a couple of candles under plant pots into the greenhouse just to try to keep the temperature above freezing if possible.

Whilst fighting with the fleece I also found my first harvest of 2025:

And perhaps even more surprising, these:

Some of the garlic is just starting to poke its nose out of the soil too. Always reassuring to see that coming up, especially this year given that I ended up planting the cloves a little later than I'd prefer to.

James

 

[enrico]

Does anyone use Yorkshire Seed Company? Really cheap seeds AND 35 percent off today. Just wondered if you had good or bad reviews.

 

[JamezF]

This afternoon I have been making candles. A beekeeper's craft perhaps, but in this case nothing to do with beekeeping... My wife and I collected together all of the unusable ends of (non-beeswax) candles that we've had after using them during the many power cuts we had in 2024 and I've melted them down and remade new candles using moulds made from tins for dried yeast.

The intention is to use them in the greenhouse (as mentioned a couple of posts back) to try to keep the frost at bay and nurse my pepper plants through the rest of Winter.

James

 

[JamezF]

Evicted my first batch of candles from their moulds this morning and took them for a test drive. Putting them into the freezer for half an hour before "demoulding" was a revelation. The candles were almost rattling around in the moulds by that point and pretty much fell out when I turned them upside down.

Hardly at show levels of perfect, but they work and I don't reckon the peppers will be too fussy if it gets them through the next eight weeks or so.

Made another batch of four today too. Looking at the amount of wax I have left I reckon there might be enough for at least eight more.

James

 

[enrico]

Evicted my first batch of candles from their moulds this morning and took them for a test drive. Putting them into the freezer for half an hour before "demoulding" was a revelation. The candles were almost rattling around in the moulds by that point and pretty much fell out when I turned them upside down.

Hardly at show levels of perfect, but they work and I don't reckon the peppers will be too fussy if it gets them through the next eight weeks or so.

Made another batch of four today too. Looking at the amount of wax I have left I reckon there might be enough for at least eight more.

James

Be interested to see if the wicks flood

 

[JamezF]

Be interested to see if the wicks flood

I'm hoping they won't. The wicks would be correctly-sized for the candle were it made of beeswax, but I believe paraffin wax can use a smaller wick. Of course I don't know that the originals were actually made of paraffin wax anyhow. They could be soya or something like that.

James

 

[Erichalfbee]

Hardly at show levels of perfect, but they work and I don't reckon the peppers will be too fussy if it gets them through the next eight weeks or so.

Can you tell me how many you leave in the greenhouse? How well does that work?
CO2 for the plants too

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

The wicks would be correctly-sized for the candle were it made of beeswax, but I believe paraffin wax can use a smaller wick.

it does

Can you tell me how many you leave in the greenhouse? How well does that work?

an old neighbour and workmate of my grandfather, Arthur 'up and down' James always left a lit candle in his 10x8' greenhouse early season when he feared a sharp spring frost.

 

[JamezF]

Can you tell me how many you leave in the greenhouse? How well does that work?

Thus far I've used the stub-ends of a few small candles and burnt two at a time, one at either end of the greenhouse under an upturned clay pot, when we're likely to get a frost. The candles sit in small tins on top of bricks, just to try to prevent a fire in the event of an accident. It's a big greenhouse though. Probably in the region of 3m wide by 10m long. These ones that I've made I'll probably burn just the one in the middle of the greenhouse. I'm also going to put a piece of crock over the hole in the clay pot; not to block it, but just so it sits in the stream of hot gases coming out of the hole in the pot and acts as an additional heat store.

As to whether it really works, I can't say for certain as I don't have a control and I also have horticultural fleece draped over the pepper plants, but for many years it has been a common piece of advice for when there are tender plants in an unheated greenhouse and frosts are likely. The upturned clay pot effectively acts like a store for the heat produced by the candle and slowly radiates it into the greenhouse. Candles do actually produce a surprisingly large amount of energy when they burn. It's just that normally we let it all escape very rapidly. Of course just because people say it, doesn't make it true There are after all people who swear you need to double-dig your veg plot every Winter and I've not had a spade near mine in five years now. What I can say is that whilst all the pepper plants in my polytunnel are shrivelled and brown at this point -- the frost last week saw the last of them off -- the ones in the polytunnel are still astonishingly leafy and green.

It's now become a challenge for me just to get the plants through to next season. I never expected them to last until Christmas in good health and now we're into the new year I just want to see if I can keep them going using whatever means I can think of

James

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

I've got three chilli plants still alive and we've had a few hard frosts. I'm just leaving them to their own devices and see what happens

 

[JamezF]

I've got three chilli plants still alive and we've had a few hard frosts. I'm just leaving them to their own devices and see what happens

I've done that before. No good has come of it

James

 

[enrico]

I've done that before. No good has come of it

James

The last frost got ours, picked the chillies and ditched the plants.