Today, at least in this house, was the start of the gardening season. Tom turned thirteen on Friday and I always try to sow some seeds around his birthday so am writing this post with compost under my nails for the first time this year. On the windowsill upstairs are the Nicotiana Sensation in a tray, some Sweet Peas (parentage unknown, seed gathered from the allotment last year), and in the cold frame are a tray of Leek Musselburgh, soon to be taken over to the greenhouse at Mums for her to keep an eye on. I also pruned the autumn fruiting raspberries and gave them a bit of a mulch with some leaf mould from a couple of years ago.
It was a very cold (freezing) day but blue skies, and I went down to the allotment to see what was happening down there. No one around but really nice to be out there. We have summer raspberries there, blackcurrants, redcurrants, gooseberries, a big, big strawberry bed, and we planted four blueberry bushes last autumn with some ericaceous compost (but will probably have to do battle with the wood pigeons for them come the summer).
Also in is the Purple Sprouting Broccoli, which is looking okay despite the freezing weather (fingers crossed, lost the lot in the bad weather last year), garlic, onion sets planted in the autumn, some artichokes, rhubarb, and some broad beans under cloches doing nothing at the moment due to the cold.
So it feels good to be starting again. This is one of the oak trees
that line the path of the allotments. I would really love to know how old these trees are (about 3 1/2 hugs around if anyone can work it out).... We have promised ourselves a petrol strimmer this season so we dont spend so much time on maintenance and can spend more time actually growing things, ruminating and generally making it up as we go along. Welcome to my world.
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