Running to seed

Picking things at the appropriate moment isn't something I'm always good at. As a consequence, there are often plants in the greenhouse which get to the flowering stage when they should have been harvested long before. Sometimes, this can be useful - I've got carrots left over from last year, for example, which survived the winter in the greenhouse beds and are now sending up flowers.

The carrots on the right are either Little Finger or Chanteney Red Core. Not sure which.*

The ones on the left are purple carrots. The colour of the flowers makes that fairly clear!

I'm planning on collecting the seeds from these: something I've never done before. There are so many flowers that I don't think I'll ever have to buy carrot seed again...

Something similar happened with some salad onions that I failed to pull last year.

You can see the black seeds in the one below, almost ready to drop. I picked this and two other seedheads and put them in a bag to finish drying out.

All these flowers are doing a good job of attracting pollinating insects into the greenhouse, which is just what I need as the tomatoes are flowering now. There are even respectable-sized fruit on some of them.

The pepper plants are starting to flower, too. This grasshopper was almost perfectly camouflaged against one of the new leaves.

*Labelling of crops being another personal point of failure...