Sunday 13 March 2011
whenever the cool air masses return to siberie or the north pole or wherever they come from, the increasing power of the sun can be felt, allowing me to take off the hat and neckwarmer and enjoy the warmth of the rays
last week there was one day so fine and clear and dry that i was able to continue cutting a bit more of the lawn in the back garden ... the grass is so long in most places that i have to rake the clippings afterwards ... and if there is any one job in the garden that is the toughest and the most tiring it is raking grass clippings ... give me digging over a garden bed any day over raking grass clippings ... having said that i have to admit that the raking does do the lawn a lot of good to remove the old stuff and give a bit of air to the new stuff
the other job of the week was to consolidate what i call the wildflower preservation garden ... some 25 or 30 years ago in the spring i hand-dug the entire back garden area and sowed a wildflower and grass mixture ... for a couple of years i had a real wildflower meadow complete with a wealth of insects buzzing and flying around ... as the sun came up early in the morning if you stopped and listened you could actually hear a hum ... it was like the garden was doing some kind of meditation
soon though the native weeds reclaimed the land and i had to sow some ordinary grass seed and dig some proper vegetable beds ... but since then the odd wildflower plant has popped up in some neglected corner of the garden, reached maturity and shed some seeds to come up again the next year or be blown around by the wind and come up somewhere else in another year
the last couple of years i have left unmown a rectangle of the lawn through the summer to see what would happen and wildflowers started coming up ... in the autumn i would pretend to be a goat and cut it all down to the ground with a low setting on the mower ... and the rectangle was flourishing ... so last week i dug up half a dozen healthy clusters of various wildflower plants from around the garden and planted them in the rectangle ... i also threw in some poppy seeds and the other flower seeds that didn't get planted last year in the hope that some of them would like the conditions and flourish
on the day i decided to do a tour to find the photo of the week some daffodils which were growing against a warm sun-lit wall flowered and surprised me ... one day they weren't there and the next they just appeared with their yellow hello-spring colours ... and pretty they were too
