Since that lovely sunny warm Easter spell of weather it's gone rapidly downhill. Night time temperatures especially have been below average for late April with the thermometer falling into the 3°C (37°F) mark too regularly for my liking. As you can see from my weather station output we've had three very chilly nights over the last week.
There's are rumours that we might be set for something even colder over the May Day Bank Holiday weekend with temperatures falling to freezing as a cold northerly wind sets up. Far too much to expect two Bank Holidays in a row with good weather.
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| Forecast from Netweather.tv |
I reckon the cold nights are slowing down the progress of seedlings in the greenhouse. One of the reasons I delay sowing our tomato seeds is that I'd rather they avoided these cold nights but my plan isn't working very well this year.
However, I did notice that in the pot that contained our dead nectarine tree there was a tomato seedling. This must have germinated from one of last year tomatoes that accidentally fell into the soil. I noticed the seedling a few weeks ago and over the cold nights, including some very frosty ones a few weeks ago, this young tomato plant remained unprotected.
In some ways it must be as far on as possible for a tomato plant in the greenhouse, having germinated as soon as conditions allowed. Of course I've no idea what the variety is. It's likely to have come from an F1 plant so it's unlikely to produce true to variety. I still decided to give it a bit of TLC and potted it up into a decent size pot with the intention of growing it on to see how early it might produce some ripe tomatoes of one kind or another. I'll be interested to see how far behind my other tomato plants are at producing their first ripe tomatoes.
As you can see it's got quite a head start on my tomato seeds sown on 15 April which are almost ready for pricking out into pots.
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I'm always amazed at how tomatoes crop up all over the place late in the summer even though it's only the early ones that are going to produce fruit. I've got Thursday night on the radar but the predictions have been upgraded tonight to a min of positive 1 degree.
ReplyDeleteWe've got 0°C forecast for both Saturday and Sunday morning now!
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