Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
My Greenhouse of Slow Nights
A market gardener's forced plants run one greenhouse-night ahead of the season every night of the forcing weeks, and the thermometer agrees with the plants.
- dated: "the forcing weeks"
- narrator: "Hugh Maclenny, market gardener"
2nd February.
Banked the stove at the thin hour and read the stems by lamplight, as I do. The house is called the forcing and it earns its keep. By my ledger every truss is a night to the good of the open ground: set, flowered, and swelling on the third truss while the county books put that stage a week on. I have kept a night log on the door jamb since my father's time, one pencil stroke to the night, and the strokes say what the plants say, so the two of them are in agreement and the almanac is by itself. The outside rows keep almanac time to the day, leeks and all, which I tested this morning with numb fingers. It is only indoors that the season comes early. Well — the glass was put in to bring the season early, that is what the stove is for. It was not put in to bring it one round night every night, steady as rates.
9th February.
Hung a max-min thermometer on the fence post outside the door this week, to keep the house honest. Inside reads the mild night first. Outside catches the same figures the next sundown, one night behind the glass, never two, never none, four nights running now. The almanac's word for the week agreed with the outside word, which agreed with me a day late. I am not putting those figures together with anything. I am writing down that the thermometer agrees, because it does agree, and a man keeps the weather he is given and says thanks for the mild.
16th February.
First ripe fruit off the third truss, weighed and logged and wrapped. Asked at the market sheds which day the glass season opens: the 17th. My pick-book has the harvest on the night of the 16th, and it has had it since the truss set, in my pencil, to my arithmetic. Went down with the boxes on the 17th anyway. The price clerk turned his book to me honest enough: the line for glasshouse fruit was ruled in it on the 16th, in his ruling, among the days settled round it, and no clerk rules a line for a day that has not been. He entered me there and paid the rate and wished me good morning, and the money was right, and the book is his book, and I have been over my own pick-book twice since and my pick is where my pick is.
Tonight the label tray holds one label written for the 17th in my lettering, laid written side down where I set it. The next truss is showing colour four nights before the almanac allows it room. I have signed off the jamb log to the last stroke and will light nothing else. What I leave out of the log is the same thing the label has set down more neatly than I would: whose night is the house going by — mine, or the season's?