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Saturday 12 February 2011

today was sunny, so i worked in the garden ... and noticed that these snowdrops had just opened

Nice, our snowdrops are starting too clump nicely.

nice ss.

Beautifull

Yep, our snow drops are up here too.

Monday 14 February 2011

i am not sure what this is, maybe a daisy ... in any case it usually appears all over the garden, but today i only found a few in a sheltered corner ... it must be just that little bit warmer there

Tuesday 22 February 2011

it really has been too cold and dreary to do much in the garden for the last 10 days other than to get down to some overdue digging of a new bed ... today i was out wandering around looking at the hedge and apple trees with the guy who will be doing the trimming and pruning and i was struck by these catkins ... i have no idea what the plant in the hedge is though




and then my eye was caught by this lone oak leaf and when i was looking at the photo indoors i noticed that a number of buds are forming already ... spring is not far away now

Thursday 24 February 2011

well i don't know ... you go in and out the back door a million times a day and then unexpectedly all of a sudden there is a fantastic burst of colour at your feet ... and it's a crocus ... i love the shade, to me it is a very royal colour

nice..everythings still dead here

Tuesday 1 March 2011

apart from one day the weather has been cold and grey, even bitter cold at times ... the only day that was nice was very nice and i had to take my hat and neck warmer off it was so warm in the sun

gardening recently has consisted of digging ... whatever the weather ... i am trying to bring into use a patch of ground that had a lot of nettles and brambles/backberries growing over it and their roots go way down and all around so the digging was difficult ... but as i was digging it it seemed to be perfect ground for potatoes this year and when i looked up and saw a similar square next to it which could also be used, then suddenly i had the ground to do potatoes again ... that was a nice moment in the garden

the only notable event was the visit by the guy who will be cutting my hedge to check out the new fence behind my hedge and see what the job entailed ... he also had a look at the apple trees to finish off the pruning he started last year ... while we were walking along the hedge i noticed a couple of younger plants were already starting to send out shoots




but the best thing that happened in the last week was the arrival in the post of my zucchini seeds ... the variety is alberello di sarzana and the fruit is a light yellow-green shade and very sweet ... they are picked when they reach about 15 cm or 6 inches, so they are cut when quite small ... but they are so delicious ... i have the zucchini patch all dug over and raked and now it's ready, so i thought i would try to start a plant now and see what happens

Sunday 6 March 2011

there were a couple of days this gardening week when i did not have to wear my fleece neckwarmer ... the hat was always on, but there was more warm sunlight than in any other week so far this year

lots of digging and turning over ground following by raking to make some vegetable beds was the routine of the week ... and just like last week when i was digging i just kept seeing the bed i was digging as suitable for more potatoes ... so finally i had to step out the distances and work out the number of potatoes that i needed to fill all the potatoes beds that i want to see planted this spring ... and then i went on-line and ordered king edwards

the variety king edward is great for roasting and baking ... what i like to do is bake more than i need for my evening meal and then on the next couple of days take a couple baked and refrigerated potatoes and slice them and then sautee them in a fine olive oil until crispy both sides .... yum

for the photo of the week i was struck as i walked around by the lack of anything flowering and quite by chance i stumbled upon the mistletoe beginning to form buds ... there are also still berries from last season on the tree and the birds love these as a nibble

Lovely pictures and I'm enjoying your thread Stoney .

spidergawd wrote:Lovely pictures and I'm enjoying your thread Stoney .

Me too...just lurking in the background in a non creepy way

Just finished a joint and read this for the first time. I was gutted when I got to the end of the page and there's no more I have now realised there ARE in fact dates at the top of each post....... Should have seen it coming really

It is nice to be looking at what someone is growing and it is NOT weed

Looking forward to your next instalment.

SA

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