Ten good reasons why to love your greenhouse

It needn't be anything fancy - or it could be part of the family conservatory - but a greenhouse can be a favourite place to be in the garden.  There are hundreds of reasons why to love it but here are the top ten:

1. Strawberries in May: Strawberries like a good chill over winter, otherwise they're reluctant to flower, so you wouldn't want to leave them in the greenhouse all winter long.  Move them in during February or March, however, and it's a different story.  Post-chill, the plants leap into life and come a month earlier than outdoor ones.
2. Early, sweet slug-free potatoes: The small degree of protection an unheated greenhouse affords can have a big effect on some plants.  Potatoes are a case in point as they pop up early, free of slug-holes, and are particularly tender and tasty.
3. Blemish-free tomatoes: Who hasn't had their heart broken by tomato blight?  Blight spores travel on the wind and only tomatoes under cover had a hope of surviving last summer.  The season was so bedraggled that even some greenhouse tomatoes were afflicted, but at least they stood a chance of escaping.
4. Big flowers in December:  If you have a border in your greenhouse you can have large floppy-headed chrysanthemum flowers right into December.  
5. Tiny flowers in February: At the other end of the flower scale are the tiny spring bulbs that can be fooled into thinking it's spring in February.  Plant miniature daffodils, scilla, crocuses, even roots of lily of the valley in autumn, and be treated to delicate blooms through late winter and early spring.
6. Year-round salad leaves:  It's true that by choosing the right varieties you can grow salad leaves out of doors all winter.  It's also true that those same leaves look utterly unappealing after being toughened up by cold, battered byhail and splattered in mud by winter downpours.  Grow in the greenhouse and you still need to choose the hardiest of lettuces and other leaves, but they'll reach the kitchen in beautiful condition; soft, mild and pockmark-free.
7. When you don't feel like going out into the cold:  A wet autumn is enough to put anyone off planting items such as garlic and broad beans.  Instead these can be planted in pots and modules in the greenhouse.  Here they'll hopefully catch up, and may even make better plants than they would outside.  Then they can be transplanted outside in the spring.
8. Grow aeoniums: Aeoniums and other exotics need not be ignored as not suitable for the garden but can be grown in greenhouses, where they would have no chance of surviving outside.
9. An outlet for unseasonal urges:  We all get them.  It's nothing to be ashamed of.  It's late autumn or perhaps very early psirng, and everything is snoozing under a blanket of chilly damp.  Any seed sown direct into the ground would rot, freeze or both in a matter of hours, and yet along comes a sunny mild day, a whiff of spring, and the urge to sow beocmes irresistable.  In a greenhouse - especially if you have a little heated propagation mat upon which to place your seed trays - there is almost always something that can be sown.  Perennial flowers, sweet peas, early peas, lettuces, all can be started at odd times of year under the refuge of the glass roof.
10. A place for tea and biscuits in the rain:  Perhaps the most important function of the greenhouse: when the rest of the garden is too soggy to set foot in, it's too chilly to sit outside the garden can still be enjoyed - even if it does mean listening to the rain on the roof.

Aeoniums