Spring, part 2

So, what have you all be up to for Easter? We've been gardening:

This Easter is timed just right for a fertility festival, though a bit more sunshine wouldn't go amiss. Our seasonal observance this Easter is Re-lining the Back Garden Pond. The new pond-liner arrived just in time, on Maundy Thursday. Today, Easter Sunday, Joseph got himself exceeding muddy breaking up the old edging structure of coping stones and old bricks cemented to hold together, then scooping out ooze, mud and earth to widen and deepen the old hollow and build up the front bank. I rescued edging plants, and scooped out the seven frogs of various sizes that insisted on lurking in the old mud. No tadpoles found surviving in the water which had become v. murky. Then I had to pot up all the rescued plants -- fundraising plant stall fodder. Tomorrow, when its all dried out a bit (fingers crossed, touch wood) we tackle putting in the new liner and re-building the pond edges.

So I still didn't get around to sowing parsnips and leek seeds in our accumulated collection of toilet paper cardboard inner tubes, nor brassicas. Friday, though, I pricked out tomato seedlings to grow on in individual pots. I thought I'd been very restrained in my tomato seed sowing: just four seed-pots per variety (double for Gardeners Delight and Tigerella), and just one standard size seedling module tray of tomatoes. All the packets were a few years old, so I scattered a few seeds in each seed-pot just to be on the safe side. I think almost all germinated: so the greenhouse is now crammed with: 24 Gardeners Delight, 26 Tigerella, and about a dozen each of (heritage seed library varieties) Salt Spring Surprise, Black Plum, and Big Rainbow. Seven sweet peppers (capsicum) are still in the electric propagator tray, which sits on top of the old fridge outside the kitchen door, under our new glass-roofed back porch. See, I only sowed five tomato varieties -- exceedingly restrained -- but still end up with nearly 100 baby tomato plants. Ah well, fundraising plant stall fodder. Get in touch if you want to drop in and adopt a couple of infant tomatoes...

Out the front, we have tulips -- three window boxes of them. First out was the windowbox of Apricot Beauty in with a flame-orange variety and white daffs, while the Magnolia stellata was still doing its starry starry sky flowering impression. As the magnolia petals dropped, so did the orange tulips. But Princess Irene was opening up in her window box: rusty-apricot petals edged golden yellow with flashes of green running through, double-flowered -- she's looking pretty speccy, at her peak now. And below, alongside the continuing Apricot Beautys, bronze Abu Hasan and a dark purple red variety are still developing, still to open up and do their stuff. Grape hyacinths (muscari) all along the path, and indigo and coral lungworts rampaging across the garden. We're also knee-deep in forget-me-nots. Columbines have put up their heads and are just opening -- nourishing herds of greenfly (aphids) which are the base of garden food webs, food for the ladybird, hoverfly and (if we're lucky) lacewing populations -- then when the aphids take to the air, they are the 'aerial plankton' that is needed to feed summer swallows, martins and swifts. Kill off the 'insect pests' and you kill off the birds that live on them, as I wrote indignantly to Organic Gardening magazine a couple of days ago -- but let the aphids have their heads on mere ornamentals and you support the web of life. In a couple of weeks, we'll have baby ladybird 'alligators' and the translucent bird-poo grubs of hoverfly eating the aphids back into balance.

Last weekend, I planted up a summer windowbox for the front: three varieties of ivy-leaf geranium, among dark-blue lobelia and yellow 'creeping jenny' (Lysimachia numularia). Today I planted up three varieties of purple pansies into a windowbox to sit outside the dining room window, a shady spot under the new glass roof; there's a large deep velvety purple black variety, and two small violas -- violet-edged creamy white petals of Magnifico, and Coconut Ice with purple upper petals and creamy lower petals.


Spring Part 1 is crocus time through to early daffodils, frogspawn, and the magnolia stellata and blackthorn come into bloom. Spring part 2 is forget-me-nots, tulips and muscari, fruit trees in blossom, tadpoles hatch, and the magnolia stellata drops its petals. And broccoli broccles. Spring Part 3 will (if I remember right) be branches clothed with leaves, flowering of elderberry, hawthorns and lilac -- and Springwatch back on TV with lots of baby birds. This week, though, we've had a huge and fluffily downy just-fledged wood pigeon (with the white crescent moons still to appear each side of its neck) perched on the arch in the back garden -- as if its parents left it there as a safe spot where it could find its own feet, wings and food.