Up the garden path - Sheep, nuthatch, cherry blossom and ebooks.

Hello and it’s a superb Saturday today, with glorious weather. I have been taking it easy in the garden today. Less weeding, and more wandering about picking daffodils. And looking at the cherry blossom. Well, that’s not the only thing to report on the garden front... the hawthorn bushes by the house have come into leaves. 

They are very small at the moment, but are as vibrant green as they will get all year round. One thing people don’t realise is that you can use hawthorn leaves in salad – they taste a little nutty. And I guess people will think you are a little nutty for trying them. But they do taste really nice.

The crab apple tree leaves are bright red at the moment; it is always funny how bright they are – almost like autumn. The crab apple always surprises me, because I always think it should flower before it has leaves – but it never does.

A brief walk shows that bluebell leaves are poking out, thousands of them in a nearby wood. They are not flowering yet. But give them time and they will be very impressive.

I was watching the bird feeder today and saw the first nuthatch for a while. It was feeding upside down. It seems strange to see it again, I didn’t think they were supposed to be in the country at this time of year and haven’t seen them for months. Still I am not a bird expert. So I guess I was wrong.

The Bird Cherry is flowering away, completely covered with blossom, and I can smell grass cuttings. So, it feels a little like we are in the middle of spring. I noticed the daffodils are now all out in flower. That seems early to me. They are supposed to be out at easter holiday, but I don’t think we will have many then. They will have already finished. White anemones are flowering where we planted them a few years back, not a complete success – we had planted a lot more than came up- but the ones we did manage to grow are starting to become thicker bushes. And we still have hopes for really thick clumps. Maybe in a few years.

Our vegetable sowing is a little behind. We have done some, but not as much as normal. Life is busy J

And I have been writing a pretty comprehensive booklet about growing carrots. It should end quite large... and for sale on Kindle for a dollar. I don’t think it will make me rich, but it is worth a try.

In the meantime, we are almost on top of the weeds in a lot of beds, but we still have the flower beds to do, so I guess tomorrow weeding will happen ;)

Have you noticed how much better gardeners world is on TV at the moment? It is almost like it used to be – a normal gardener in his own garden. That’s always quite interesting.

Our three new lambs are doing well, as well... gambling along, without a care in the world. 

Hope you have a good time in the garden... this is the best of times in the garden, not yet too hot, and with birdsong, and new beautiful flowers popping up every two minutes.

Up the garden path - here comes the sun - designing the blog - the revenge of the daffodils

Hello there, a wonderful Wednesday to you all, the weather today reminds me of a certain song...

“Here comes the sun” by the beatles. 

It’s like a miracle! Two days of gorgeous weather, light breezes... almost like a spring day. I said in my first up the garden path that March was the start of the gardening year, and the last two days has certainly been great weather wise.

It has been warm, and weeding has been... less of a chore than normal.

So what is the garden like at the moment? Well, one true sign of spring is that the grass is growing at a faster rate than lightning. And of course we did our first proper lawn mow of the year. Or would have, if the lawn mower hadn’t died with much over the top Shakespearean bad acting.

In fact, I don’t think we can morn for departed lawn mower, having cut through its power cord (twice) ,  dropped it (regularly) and asked it to cut 1 foot high grass one time more than we should have... it has perished after doing its duty.

So I guess at some stage soon we will have to buy a new one.

I was walking down to the sheep today, and there is a path of daffodils which I planted last year. Bulbs are funny things; you never know how well you did until months later. Well, I can confirm that not all of them came up... but enough did that in a few weeks down it is going to be a delight to see them when they are in flower.

So far we are at five daffodils in flower... I can’t wait until we get to see something more like this...

We’ve been trying to get a wider variety of them, so they flower at different times. In theory that should work, but in practice last year they all got bunched together due to snow. So we got all our spring in one go. Hope we don’t repeat that this year.

It always feels like an act of hope, planting bulbs in the autumn. It’s fun remembering back to how deep you were digging,  on a bright autumn day, as the sun was starting to go down and it was already starting to turn cold. The leaves were starting to fall from the trees. And, there you are... putting flowers in the bank for the spring. Sometimes you get very little from it. A few years ago we planted 1000 snowdrops, and got only around 50 back. Almost nothing at all. This time, we have been lucky.

But... even the patch of snowdrops that we planted has slowly started to spread.

Planting daffodils is always an odd experience. People seem to think you should use some weird bulb planter. I have always found just lifting the grass with a shovel works best. The bulb planters are useless in our garden. None of the soil has had enough improvement yet.

Although, even though it is not a gardener’s world flower bed, the plants still grow vigorously.

Catkins are starting to come out, and I noticed a few leaves on several bushes... I find that smaller bushes often start first, and then you get a progression. In our garden, the hawthorn and elder are the last of the main tree flowers. 

I am looking forward to the pear blossom, it won’t be long now.

There are rumours of bad weather appearing in the weather forecast... and we had a hard frost yesterday. So maybe winter hasn’t finished with us yet. But hope springs eternal.

So... what have I been doing?  Apart from cut grass, there have been ample weeding opportunities to be had for all. And of course you might have noticed it has been change central on the blog. It took me a while to get it sorted out... I am not good at graphics programs. But I hope that at least everything is easy to read.

Starting a new blog is always a strange experience... I noticed that we have only just been indexed by Google, and it hasn’t adjusted to our posting schedule yet. Which, admittedly, is because it has been a little random.  I hope that it starts to crawl the site more regularly.

But, even if it doesn’t I know that every post I write is another seed in the ground...

Oh, did I mention another cool thing? The rhubarb is coming up... now I have to decide whether to force or not. In fact, i think I won’t force it. We grew the bed from seed... which is unusual. The best way to do it is to buy a plant from a garden centre. But, we wanted to see if the old fashioned ways work. Well... yes they do, but it is slower, and the plants take longer to establish. I get the impression we planted them in the wrong place too, they needed a bit more shade.

Sometimes gardens are like that, you make a few minor mistakes... but everything is a learning experience.