The Plants Have Arrived! Eeek!

It was like Christmas, seven months early, at our house today when the plants from these guys for the school gardening club arrived.

A friend staggered up the garden path with a large box which one of my daughters, a club member, helped me to unpack. We waded through layers of straw until we hit gold. It was a bit like a farmyard version of lucky dip, straw everywhere plus plants.


Thanks to their early arrival, I am now nervously looking after a load of small green visitors which will hopefully grow into cabbages, cauliflowers, beetroot, spinach, a whole host of different lettuces, tomatoes, strawberries, runner and barlotti beans and courgettes.

They're a bit droopy after their long journey from Cornwall so I've placed them in pots, watered them and given lodging in my growhouse to the most precious ones.


While this has been rather exciting it has also added to my List of Gardening Club Worries, which is growing ever longer by the day. Currently nestling in my Top Ten are:

• The plants will all be eaten by slugs and I will have cost the school £49.
• Or they will all die before we get to plant them on Tuesday and I will have cost the school £49.
  
• The children will take approximately 30 seconds to plant them and I have no idea what we will do with the other 37 minutes.
• It will be rather chaotic like last time.
• I will forget my watering cans again.
• We really should have built three beds and not two because I have 15 children and five to a bed would work out better. Doh!
• I will, once again, give the impression to the staff of being not very good or, worse, Not Up To It.
• I will not enjoy it.
• Once the plants are in I'm not sure, apart from watering, what we shall do next exactly. I have some vague ideas but....
• We will have too many plants for the beds or, conversely, not enough.

There is also matter of the offer of help from someone, which on the face of it is a Good Thing. Except while I've been transplanted into alien soil, so far out of my comfort zone, I would just like to do it by myself until I get established. I've no idea if this offer has been accepted by the headteacher and I feel a big sigh escaping. Things are never simple.


First though I have to come up with some inexpensive slug and snail deterrents. The budget is nought pounds. Oh, I do like a challenge. Obviously.