We were expecting peppers

Like most gardeners I love growing things from seed.

Unlike most gardeners, I’m never really 100% sure of what I’ve planted. Flushed with enthusiasm that the calendar has reached the appointed ‘Sew between’ date, I rush out to the garden, fill the seedling trays with new compost, grab hold of the vermiculite bag (which seems to go on forever), plug in the propagator and reverentially open my specially-designed, seed-packet-holding tin.

It is time. Come on out you little beauties.

The instructions on each packet are reasonably carefully read and the seeds are sewn accordingly. I then place the seed trays inside the propagator, (remembering not to exclude light). After which I ought to write a clear label as to what I’ve sewn. Except… it’s going to be pretty obvious really, isn’t it.

Tomato seedlings look like tomato seedlings, cucumbers are sewn individually, and I’ve been growing rocket for years, I know what that looks like. And if it’s anything new I can remember which corner of the propagator I put it in.

One week later and it’s like someone’s refreshed the screen on an old Etcha-sketch. My mind is a complete blank. Have I actually sewn the tomatoes yet or was it the kale? Which corner did I put the chilli peppers in – was it the left or the right. Nothing’s come up yet. Where are the packets? Oh yeah, I threw them away.

My wife, a woman who is no stranger to sarcasm, will say things like: ‘Did you switch the propagator on?' “Of course I switched the… well, I thought I had but, someone’s gone and turned the plug to the extension cable off at the wall.”

So you get the picture – there’s a certain Russian roulette nature to what comes through in the garden. This year I have been nurturing some wasabi rocket only to find out, when it got large, that it not only looked like kale: It was kale.

In April my trouble-and-strife asked me to sew some chilli peppers and I duly obliged. Except that one plant was very small and the rest grew like topsy. Although the flowers were pepper-like they produced Chinese lanterns with a small green fruit underneath which went a lovely aubergine colour when it burst through the lantern’s sheath.

They clearly weren’t peppers, and as the fruits were green not orange, they couldn’t be cape gooseberries. But what were they? We had to go back to my original Thompson and Morgan seed order to check off the likely suspects. It became like an elaborate game of horticultural Cluedo. Nothing on the list of seeds looked like this, though. In the end we worked out that they were tomatillos. The fruits are succulent, not as sweet as tomatoes and less flavoursome, but they’re beautiful to look at in a salad once they eventually ripen. The great mystery, however, is that I have never ordered tomatillo seeds.

Though next year my resident plantswoman is ordering me some plant labels.