In The Garden, Sunny But Cold

Usually March means spring has arrived and everything is go but I’m not so sure this year. We’re still getting pretty hard frosts, minus 5 in our garden last night, and the day time temperature is well down on normal. In fact we’ve un-melted ice in the shady parts.

However, high pressure is bringing us blue skies and sunshine however cold. Now our garden is a bit of a mess. With all that went on at the back end of last year, Val hopping about unable to put weight on her broken ankle for weeks, the end of year tidy up didn’t happen.

Then we had a proper winter with real snow, that doesn’t help you get straight. So now it was into action. We grow quite a lot in pots, both flowers and some salad crops. The spent compost from these ends up as a soil improver on the allotment.

When we were in the house before this with the concrete garden and no allotment, the spent compost presented a bit of a problem. Ideally you should use fresh compost each year to avoid disease build up and keep nutrient levels at optimum. However, we found emptying the pots onto a sheet and mixing them all up, then adding general purpose fertiliser along with some slow release fertiliser served us as well.

But I digress, now it’s a matter of loading all the pots into the car and shipping them down to the plot. So assembling all the pots on the patio ready to load.

Next was some trimming and pruning. The crab apple needed a prune to say the least. A bit late, but the weather is holding things back. Some bushes needed cutting back, especially the one trying to hide a window and I made a start on those.

Now despite it being sunny, it was pretty cold and by half past five it had cut through my jacket, sweater, shirt and thermals so it was back indoors to a warming bowl of soup.

At least the garden is starting to look something like, so next for the allotment which I’m afraid is a bigger task altogether.

Posted in Allotment Garden Diary

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