The Gardening Year Resumes

The problem with writing about gardening is of course that it repeats -- unless you grow something different each and every year (which is perhaps theoretically possible), you'll end up with umpteen iterations of the number of broad bean seedlings you planted that day, or how much had to be pruned from the raspberry canes. But sometimes that is exactly what you want to say, irrespective of how many times it's been said before, because yesterday was a really mild, pleasant day -- the first mild, pleasant day we've had this year, and a welcome change after the cold weather that seemed to dominate February, with the wind out of the north and temperatures too low to spend any length of time out of doors.

So yesterday we hustled off down the allotment, me to dig over a couple of beds and Judith to plant stuff, and both of us to harvest stuff. The broccoli has begun to brockle, so we picked some of that -- and here's a photograph of a purple sprouting broccoli, our favourite -- and, with some of our leeks, turned it into broccoli cheese for dinner.



We also planted our broad bean seedlings, and here's a photograph of them, with their anti-pigeon and anti-fox defences -- the stakes keep the foxes out; the plastic bottles rattling in the wind stop the pigeons from pecking off the tender shoots -- and the cardboard tubes in which the seedlings were grown left to rot down alongside them.



Our next tasks will be to plant out our potatoes and repair some of the bed edging. In the meantime, there is frogspawn in the allotment pond and new growth on the raspberry canes: at last, it really does feel like spring.