Hello and a very happy February to you. How is it for you so
far?
As is often the way here, the weather has changed with the
flip of a coin, and we’ve just had several days of warm (as in, above zero),
sunny weather. This coupled with a little bit of weekend rain has killed off
a lot of the snow. The road is now clear for the first time this year and the
garden is teasing us by revealing big patches of grass.
The primroses under the apple tree have flowered, and, even
more exciting than that, the kale has re-emerged from under all that snow. Woo
yeah, KALE! If it carries on like this, we’ll be able to dig up the last of the
parsnips soon (they've been frozen in the ground since December). Depending on the temperatures, we’ll probably sow our tomato seeds indoors in the next few weeks, and that’ll be the official kick-off of
Gardening Bore 2017, in which I’ll wang on about how great vegetables are for four
months and then spend a month whining about having too many courgettes and then
two months insisting it’s too hot to do anything. I bet you can hardly wait. I
know I can’t.
Iggy the cat has just been enjoying himself getting reacquainted
with the various mole tunnels in the garden, but thankfully returned empty-handed
(or rather, empty-jawed). I have a bit of a soft spot for moles. I mean, I know
they bugger up the grass something awful, and we’ve lost more than a few young
plants to their burrowing over the years, but they mostly stay out of the veg
patch and they’re just so damn cute. I hate it when the cats leave us a dead
mole. (They never eat them, they just deposit them on the terrace, belly up,
little pink mole feet in the air.) I once read something about it being easier
to move house than get rid of moles, which was initially really alarming but
then strangely comforting – once I knew I couldn’t do anything about them, I
just stopped being bothered by them. Now we co-exist quite happily (cat-on-mole
attacks aside). And, as a bonus, we scoop up all their fine molehill earth and mix
it with compost for seedlings.
