Published: 8 May 2026 - Watch on YouTube
Welcome back. This is the day after what I have started calling the May doomsday. On the 2nd of May my little mobile greenhouse blew over while it was full of seedlings, and yesterday I simply could not face the clear up. Today the sun is out, so I have run out of excuses and it is time to deal with the job I really did not want to deal with.
I will never again leave my mobile greenhouse unsecured, not even to go and wash my hands. That is exactly what happened. I had been doing a few jobs in the rain, my hands were filthy, so I zipped the greenhouse down meaning to wheel it back into the house once I had cleaned up. As I was washing my hands in the bathroom, my husband was cooking dinner and I heard him say, oh, your tomatoes. He ran out, then I ran out, and by then it had already gone over.
Yesterday my mind went straight into task mode. I could not think, I just grabbed plants and tried to save whatever I could. It was such an unnecessary situation and it was entirely down to my own daftness of nipping indoors and leaving everything unsecured.
The remarkable thing is that almost everything came through it. I honestly thought I would be lucky to save a handful, but I do not think I lost a single one of my original plants. There are a few semi casualties, mostly broken leaves. One tomato, the Bosman, has snapped on the main stem but is still holding on by half of it, and another has broken near the base, so I might still rescue both.
The peppers all survived too, with just one broken stem from the top. I have never had a pepper snap like that before, because they are usually so flexible and far less fragile than tomatoes, so we will see how it recovers. The brassicas came off lightly as well, just a few broken leaves here and there. I have 15 each of broccoli, kohlrabi and brussels sprouts, so I am really not worried about those.
The part that annoys me most is not the fall itself, it is that I no longer know which plant is which. When I was rescuing them I just dropped each one into whichever empty pot was nearest, so nothing is where it started. I hate that kind of disorganisation. Oddly enough, the plants that still had their name labels attached stayed put in their pots, so at least I have one confirmed example of each variety to work from.
My tomatoes are Bosman, Ożarowski, Warszawski, red pear, sweet aperitif and favorite. The Ożarowski and Warszawski have a distinctive leaf shape, so I can group those together, and the Bosman has darker, slightly purple tinged foliage that sets it apart. Two of the plants had a little extra seedling growing alongside, which I worked out were the sweet aperitif and favorite, the smaller baby being the sweet aperitif and the bigger one the favorite.
My friend gave me 16 of her seedlings, sown at the end of February, so a good three weeks older than mine that went in after the equinox. They have never done well, and after the fall they were in a worse state than anything of mine. Where my seedlings kept their compost intact around the roots and could simply be popped back in, hers had scattered everywhere.
She sowed them in what looks like coco coir, which I have never used because I have always been happy with how seeds germinate in multi purpose compost. When it is dry it has no structure at all, more like sand, and the roots do not seem to bind to it. When I water it, the whole level sinks and exposes the fragile part of the stem below the surface. I had actually snapped two of these seedlings just by watering them with a normal watering can, which has never happened to me before. I am potting them up into plain compost in plastic pots to see if they can pick up the pace, and I would love to know if anyone has had better luck growing in coco coir.
I spent most of the early afternoon doing every random, non urgent job in the garden I could think of, purely so I would not have to come and deal with this. Something in my head just kept blocking me. My husband, bless him, told me to go and sit outside for a few minutes in the warm sun, said he would bring me a glass of wine and told me to do nothing for a bit.
So that is the plan. A glass of wine, something on Netflix, and I will get myself into a nice robotic state of potting up. I decided to start with my friend's tomatoes, because I am not sure they will make it otherwise.
I got there in the end. To work out which was which I sat and watched the footage I had filmed before the incident, studying the leaf shape, the colour, the height and the bushiness of each plant. I would put myself at about 90 percent confident, and if I have made the odd mistake, well, they are only plants and nobody got hurt.
All the tomatoes are now potted up into bigger pots, including the red pear with its broken top, which I have kept just to see if it throws out a side shoot. My friend's seedlings are in proper plastic pots of ordinary compost. Next time I have a spare minute I will give the peppers the same treatment, as most of them flopped over and fell out too and just need a refresh.
In the end nothing terrible happened, just the stress, the annoyance and an afternoon of extra work I could have done without. Once I actually sat down with a glass of wine and got on with it, it was nowhere near as bad as I had built it up to be in my head. If you have grown seedlings in coco coir, do let me know how you got on and whether I am doing something wrong, because I am genuinely puzzled. At least the day ended with a lovely sunset. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
Tags: #WindyGarden #TomatoSeedlings #GreenhouseDisaster #PottingUp #CocoCoir #MyWindyGarden