Plans Ahead

How can it be April already? How? Just... how??

It's growing season, and I honestly don't know if I have the energy or wherewithal to commit to the allotment this year. I'm sad to say that I think this will be our last year of tending it. If it were just at the end of our garden, or made of soil rather than brick, or if we could leave all our things there safely, then it would be totally doable. Right now it's a drive away with all the equipment in the car with no idea when we'll return. Hardly ideal. And this year, just like last, there has seen a bit of extra workload due to the magazine now.

I don't really like being beaten so there is a good chance I might actually do the diametric opposite of giving up. But after three weeks away from home, and having three years' worth of crud to shift on returning, I am so very weary.

For now I'll enjoy growing season the old fashioned way - by buying flowers, watching blossom pop up on our trees, and enjoying seasonal food from our farmers.

Allotment Notes

The ground on our allotment is evil. Pure evil. A clay soil that just keeps on breaking your back season after season. We're more than sure that this must have been a river bed thousands of years ago. There is no way it could not have been. And what we battle with is soil too heavy to work when wet and absolutely impossible to break when sun baked. If we don't keep on top of it we will cry later.

We're making plans on how we hope to change our soil, over time, on this land of ours. There will be hard work initially and hopefully some pay-off further down the line.

For now we do what we can. The garlic is in, and we'll do our official garlic for over-wintering with the leeks and onions, but we'll see what we can get until then. Beans in, although to be fair the ground might be a bit too cold... we're experimenting here. The wild area is going to be seeded next week insha'allah. For now, we've added a tub for a pond and hopefully something will spawn there when the rainwater fills it up. This is the boys nature reserve really. I know the eldest will plant himself there at some point and fill his boots with what he learns.

Potatoes - in! Cabbage and kale and brassicas - in!. Gooseberries have flowered a little and behind a big lump of bramble on our new patch of allotment the boys discovered a fox run and rhubarb. A nice little spring bonus.

Still so much to do. Because it never really ends. It's a circle of life kinda thing... I feel a song coming on...

Garden

In the warm spring days we now find ourselves in (on the good days!), we spend as much time outdoors as we can - catching up on all that vitamin D we missed out on over winter, feeling the wind, watching things unfold, one petal at a time.

Days seem so much fuller in the warm months, don't they? There is always so much to do, so much to plan for, so much to hope for. Just sitting and listening to the busy-ness of the wildlife, such as it is, around us there is also an urgent tone about it. We watch the birds gather twigs and marvel at their ingenuity in their constructions. The ants have returned with a gusto. Hoverflies are fighting over the best stretch of branch, and butterflies and bees wind their ways into our garden. All of them, and us, on their own path with their own work, weaving in and out of each others' lives in a beautiful dance.

The sun brings with it such good energy. It seems after the longest winters there is greater joy in spring.

The Forsythia Saga

Only now is our garden awakening. We can count the number of full leaves on one hand, and they are all plum tree. The Forsythia which is usually fully flowered at the end of February here has only just started to bloom. I think we can confirm that this is a crazy late spring.

But spring it is, and the late start has me itching to throw myself into all things gardening - coupled with the fact that we had no allotment last year, and well, I'm ready to watch things grow. You too?