Well, they’ve been outside day and night for a few days, but now they’re hung up in their final position. Unless the weather suddenly turns colder (in which case they’re coming back inside, because nothing in there is frost-resistant other than the ivy and I would cry sad tears if everything in there died), they’re out there for the rest of the year.

Our house is built into the side of a hill, and the brick wall where the hanging baskets live divides the level of the ground floor from the level of the first floor and garden, like so:

Even though the wall they’re against is sheltered and tucked into an alcove, it’s south-facing and gets a decent amount of sun. The lower basket will get slightly less, so hopefully the fuschias in there won’t have conniptions about needing more shade.

It’s nerve-wracking finally putting them out properly, though. They are so small! And so delicate! And they’ll either grow or they won’t, and there’s really very little I can do about that beyond giving them sunlight and water and fertiliser and protecting them from the worst of the elements. There wasn’t much I could do about it when they were inside, either, but somehow keeping them inside gives the illusion of control in a way that putting them outside doesn’t. I can’t control the rain or the temperature out here; I can’t keep insects and other plant-munching beasties off them (although slugs and snails are the worst culprits and they’re going to have a struggle getting there anyway); I can’t make sure the neighbours don’t inadvertently harm their self-esteem. This bothers me.

I also planted the sweet peas out in one of the proper beds, against a wall that’s already covered with a kind of wooden mesh they’ll hopefully enjoy climbing up. Some of them look great and are already reaching the lower part of the mesh, but others look a great deal less enthusiastic about this whole growing business. Hopefully they’ll get used to their new home sooner rather than later, because I’ll feel like a total gardening failure if I can’t even get sweet peas growing.

The beds where the sweet peas live are technically part of the communal garden that adjoins ours, so we share them with four different sets of neighbours. The landlord had always taken care of them before us, and so we dug out the weeds and planted some violas in there last autumn (still going strong, too; violas are amazing). Two new sets of neighbours have moved in since then, though, and both are quite keen on gardening, so I do feel a bit guilty about having claimed those beds when we already have a bit of garden of our own. Not that anyone’s objected, mind – they all seem quite happy with the rest of the garden, and hey, who could object to a nicely-weeded bed of colourful violas? – but still. I assuage my guilt by lending out garden implements and giving seedling tours to the three-year-old who lives upstairs.

Everything is up and growing and green and wonderful now. It’s still a little too early to plant things outside – we probably won’t get any more frosts, but I’ve seen snow in April before – so at the moment all the vegetables are still living indoors, and probably getting less light than they could do with. Still, they seem to be growing well enough.

The rocket (in the fibre pots above) is the only one I’m really worried about. Yesterday some of the seedlings started to wilt, and on closer inspection it looked worryingly like damping off, which could rapidly wipe out the entire seed tray of my much-loved, much-cherished little seedlings. Because it is a fungal infection, and fungi HAVE NO CONSCIENCE.

Anyway, I took out all the collapsing seedlings and thinned out the rest, and the rocket’s looked just fine since. Maybe not damping off, then? Or maybe I’ll still be able to save some? Not optimistic, though. Hopefully the ones already transplanted to pots above will be fine, even if I lose the rest – and at least rocket grows quickly enough that it wouldn’t be a huge loss to replant it.

The lettuce is doing really well. It could do with some thinning out now, lest the stems merge to become one super-dense rectangular lettuce mass that will achieve sentience or something, but I’ve put it off because honestly I sort of feel like a murderer thinning out seedlings. I know, I know, it’s good for them and I couldn’t plant all these lettuces anyway and damping off is more likely when they’re overcrowded. I should get to it. Maybe tomorrow.

The cucumber seedlings are growing like magic beanstalks. Really impressed with how well they’re doing, particularly because it turns out cucumber seedlings really don’t like being transplanted at all and have a tendency to wither and die if you try. (Obviously I found this out after merrily planting them in seed trays, which will teach me to do my research beforehand in future). But here they are, transplanted and growing like crazy.

Sweet peppers are growing less like crazy since they were transplanted, which is a shame and worried me quite a bit for a while. I’m about 90% convinced I overwatered them by accident after transplanting, and they just didn’t do much growing for a good while afterwards. But they seem to have regained their enthusiasm now. Tiny baby true leaves!

Tomato plants are growing away happily and efficiently, too. Heaven only knows what I’m going to do with all the ones I don’t have room for. Hey, maybe all the wedding guests can go home holding a tomato plant!

These are carrots, which again, really really don’t like being transplanted, and thus are probably going to produce evil twisted forked mutant carrots in the future. Ah, well. At least they’re growing fine now.

And onions! I am a bit worried about the onions, too, because onion seedlings seem so pathetically inefficient. They come through in bent-over loops because they can’t quite break away from the seed husk, and then proceed to bend over more and more until the non-root end pings free, with the black rotting seed husk still attached. There are better ways to do this, onions! Anyway, the advice I read seemed divided on whether or not it would help to snip the loops, so I snipped the loops of half the seedlings and will see how they do comparatively.

These are some of the snipped-off onion loops, seed husks attached. Lovely. But it turns out that cutting through onion seedlings makes the entire room smell of chives, so the onions might claw themselves back into my favour yet.

The cucumber seedlings on day 9:

Looking good! Better than expected, in fact; I wasn’t planning on seeing all of them germinate, so probably I’m going to be handing out cucumber plants to friends and family and neighbours and colleagues and passers-by who don’t walk away fast enough in months to come.

The hanging baskets and the plants for my window-boxes are still being gradually hardened off to prepare them for the outside world. They’re now up to spending a full day outside and only coming in at night, so I put them out before going to work and bring them in again when it starts getting dark. Alas, today brought heavy cold rain and hail showers right after this morning’s glorious sunshine, which wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. Poor little plants are looking a bit betrayed and disappointed in me now.