Progress with our seedlings has been very stop-start: it seems like you're staring at bare earth for years on end, then you turn your back for a moment (or take and extended Easter break) and it's like a scene from Jack and the Beanstalk.

In an attempt to stabilise these growth spurts, and to give the little new lives more light than they were getting on the shelves in front of the spare room window, we bought a mini greenhouse at the weekend.

So we have our spare room back (and the carpet is also benefitting from a lack of regular watering). And the seedlings are settling in nicely: respiring away and misting up the plastic walls of their new home.

I feel like a panto villain, knowing that soon (very soon, mwa-ha-ha) quite a few of these puny little defenceless plants will be evicted to make the half-mile trip to the rough, tough world of the allotment, to withstand assaults from slugs and snails, marauding rabbits and foxes, scorching by the sun, whistling gales, unseasonal plummeting temperatures or a severe battering from our new trigger-controlled hose.

I am feeling the pressure of the Royal Horticultural Society challenge to me (and other gardening media types) to grow them, and show the resulting produce at an autumn show. Wish me luck!

Read my last plot to plate blog