Hello everyone! My name is Endon Bear and I am the smallest member of Sonning's Hug of small bears. Sonning says I can write an item for his blog about gardening, because my tomato plants have grown so well. Sonning says I have 'green paws'!
We bears planted some tomato, pepper and chilli seeds just a couple of weeks ago, put them on a sunny window sill under some plastic covers, and soon we saw some little shoots poking through the compost. To stop them leaning towards the sunshine, Hanley Bear suggested we prop the trays up at an angle and it seems to have worked as neither my tomatoes, nor Hanley's chillies nor Sonning's peppers have got too stretched.
Polar and I have been checking my tomatoes every day and I've been astonished at how quickly they have grown. We have watered them gently and put their covers over at night to keep them warm. Today, Polar said they were ready to be potted on into separate flower pots.
'Do you want to help me, Endon?' Polar asked.
'Yes, please!' I said, so Polar took me out into the kitchen where we were going to work because it was cold and damp outdoors. Polar washed out some plant pots, to make sure they were free of plant diseases and fungus, and I helped to stack them up to dry.
Then Polar brought in a bowl of fresh compost. It smelt lovely, but she advised me not to get it on my paws in case it stained my fur. Polar gave me a picnic fork and showed me how to use it to carefully lift individual tomato plants out of the tray, holding the thin 'seed leaves' to steady them as we lowered them, one by one, into their new pots.
'We need to make sure that as much of the stem as possible is buried in the compost, but we mustn't break or bruise it,' Polar explained. 'Tomatoes make new roots along their stems, so it will help the plants become even stronger.'
Soon we had potted up all twelve of the seeds that had grown into proper little plants.
'What's going to happen to them now?' I asked. 'There isn't room for them all back on the window sill!'
'I've cleared a shelf in the greenhouse for them,' Polar explained. 'They can go into some of those yogurt pot trays and we can put them where they will get plenty of light, but be protected from cold draughts, as there are a couple of mini greenhouses inside the big one.'
Polar carried me out to see where the tomatoes were going to live until they were bigger and stronger, and the weather was milder, and she showed me how the Babbington leeks were growing, and a row of trays where she had sown lots of different varieties of salad seeds.
'They are some old ones, from my boss at work,' she explained. 'They might grow, or they might not - we'll have to wait and see!'
There was just time for me to look around the garden before it started to drizzle. I loved the bright daffodils and primulas in some of the pots but I was sad to see that the snowdrops had almost finished flowering.
'We can split them up soon and replant some in new places,' said Polar. 'There's room in the front garden for lots more.'
We checked the ponds to see if there was any frogspawn yet (there wasn't) and admired the hellebores.
Polar pointed out some flower beds she wanted to weed and replant, but it was too windy and cold for outdoor gardening today. Before we went back indoors, Polar let me climb up to the window of Grizzly's model railway workshop and tap on the glass to say hello!
There was just enough compost left for me to plant some more tomato seeds, although these are very old ones too and so we don't know if they will grow.
After that, Polar decided we had worked hard enough for second breakfast, and put some croissants in to warm up for us to share with Grizzly and the other bears. I saved the packaging, to make a cover for a big seed tray.
Then I told the other bears all about my adventures, and how I had planted some very old seeds to see if they would grow. Sonning said they might, if they had been stored somewhere cold and dark.
Hanley says there is a seed vault somewhere in Norway where seeds from all over the world are stored in case of a catastrophe. He says fierce Armoured Bears guard it, but I don't know if that part of the story is true!
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