What a contrast the days are in February.Thursday was the most miserable wet day interspersed with sleet and hail.When it is like this and I cannot work inside I pick the most boring job I can find and get my head down and plod on.It's not so bad, after all, I spent twenty years working in an office so I'm used to tedium.To help me I listen to something on my ipod.I have a pretty varied collection of music, lots of folky things,Tamla, plenty of his Bobness, (Bob Dylan) heavy metal for when I feel so inclined and joy of the twenty first century - podcasts. Most of the BBC stuff ,The Archers,Gardeners Question Time,Mark Kermode and so on is, as you would expect,superb.The Guardian Daily podcast keeps me in touch with the outside world. There are also some great independant productions - Wiggly Wigglers are very good ,as a bit of a tech head Cnet.uk is very interesting.Over the pond NPR have some great stuff. With this to keep me company in the rain I set about filling the raised beds with topsoil and levelling them off so that they could settle down before sowing. I covered one of them over with black plastic to dry it out and warm it up a bit.That kept me busy in the morning.
The afternoon was spent in the greenhouse thank goodness for the start of the growing season.
As I am lucky to have a heated greenhouse I can now get on with sowing seeds.
I normally start in January but it was so cold and covered in snow that I left it until now.
I have started with broad beans, Master Green Longpod as usual ,Parsnip Princess,and tomatoes -Favorita,Cherry,and Shirley.
Not so many flowers this year just some dahlias and cosmos and a few tagetes to keep the bugs off the vegetables.
Friday was by contrast a beautiful day, no ipod today.I was at the same place where yesterday it felt like the Battle of the Somme. The sky was clear and blue, the birds were singing their hearts out, and the lowish sun was shining through the willows reflecting the most georgeous reds and yellows.The snowdrops are at their best now and being joined by the crocuses and everything is on the starting blocks.
The raised beds are part of a new venture for me and a new and exciting garden.The new venture , - hopefully more of that in the future.In October I started a new project working for a habitat company http://www.habitataid.co.uk/ Please visit, it is very inspiring .Nick -the boss wants to create a wildlife pond which will be the subject of a course in the spring. We started by planting a wildlife hedge to surround this, and an extension to the vegetable garden. As this was part of a field still inhabited by sheep I stripped the turf to give the hedging a chance to get going.We have created some raised beds from railway sleepers which I will fill with this stripped turf. I have sown some vegetable seeds for that and am chitting some potatoes to go in next month - hopefully. This has been an exciting project and I am looking forward to the results. When the ajacent pond is dug we are hoping that all the frogs and beneficial insects will keep the vegetable garden free of all the usual culprits.
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