Here are the pansies in their normal state - in a moisture-retaining enclosure. This is how it says to store them on the packet for the first couple of weeks of their lives - it’s not that I’m cruel and like to see them suffer, honest!

The two straggly mixed pansies which grew in the pantry are looking in a very sorry state and I don’t think they are going to make it. However, every cloud has a silver lining and this one brings some new fresh healthy-looking shoots. I therefore believe that removing them from the pantry and exposing them to sunlight has been better for them than what it said on the packet.

The green and black pansies meanwhile are growing healthily, and most of them have this cute “Y” shape to them.

The sunflowers, meanwhile, boosted by a bout of warm weather, are also going completely mad. Number four (on the left here) is now almost at the top of the kitchen window, and is therefore about 7 foot tall. Wow!

(Yes, I know I need to paint the windowsill).

The nasturtiums are really rampant now - sprawling all over the edge of the patio, and also snaking through into the territory of other plants. And, best of all, there are about a dozen flowers!

Two of the boxes have been sitting on the windowsill for a fortnight, and they seem to be doing just fine and have poked up lots of cute little leaves.

However, the third (in the middle here) has been in the pantry, and is looking rather sorry for itself, having produced just two measly straggly anaemic-looking plants.

I am hoping that a move to the sunny window will perk these up but it’s rather disappointing to have a net haul of only two plants! Ironically, these are the “normal” pansies (the others are slightly more unusual varieties) which I expected to be the easiest to grow.

Sunflower four is the one nearest me, furthest from the camera. Oddly, sunflower one, nearest to the camera, looks about eight foot tall due to the perspective of the shot. I can assure you it isn’t though, much as I’d like it to be!

My dad made me slightly jealous by pointing out that a workmate of his had sunflowers that are ten feet tall. But that’s a bloke who works in a garden centre and has experience. It’s certainly something to aim for in the future, but I don’t think I’ve done bad for a beginner. And they are still growing!

Here are the new trays we bought for them

The seeds

Really the seeds. They’re tiny!

And the finished contraptions. One of them had instructions to store “excluding light” so it’s into the pantry with that one for a fortnight. The other two have gone on the breakfast room windowsill where the sunflowers and nasturtiums had their formative weeks.

• Sunflower One: 125cm
• Sunflower Two: 123cm
• Sunflower Three: 119cm
• Sunflower Four: 117cm

The nasturtiums are rampantly attempting to suffocate their pot and take over the entire patio.

Behind the leafy façade there is a spaghetti-like jungle mesh of stems competing for light and water.

And, amongst all that chaos, a bud has developed! I was wondering if the nasturtiums would ever get around to actually flowering - and now it looks like that they will (eventually) as Mr Batty found this yellow thing whilst waiting for the chicken to roast. I shall be monitoring carefully in the next few days for more buds…

To avoid sunflower one growing into the tomato pot (which is suspended about six feet from the ground from the old basketball hoop mounting) and creating some sort of sentient mutant tomato/sunflower hybrid creature capable of speech, I have re-ordered the sunflowers so that they are in reverse numerical order as you look at them from the garden. This means that number one is now on the right and number four is on the left. This replaces the previous father-son-daughter-mother (1-3-4-2) "family" formation.

Sunflowers one (shown here) and two also now have some beautiful leaf arrangements at their peaks.