IN DECEMBER I bought myself a copy of The Allotment Year, fully intending to read the summary of jobs for each month and to put as many as I could into practice. Here we are one quarter of the way into the year and I’ve yet to do that. Perhaps April will be the time to start in earnest.
Thanks to the impetus given by having Paul the gardener coming for several morning sessions we did manage to do some of the structural tasks such as replacing the shed but it’s hard to see what I could have done to advance the planting of the vegetable patch when you look out on today’s blanket of snow.
Typically after snow there’ll be a degree of melting, followed by refreezing but this time the snow stayed powdery enough for the wind to blow it into drifts. Not the 15 feet deep drifts that they’ve had in Cumbria and elsewhere but when you tramp down our garden it’s obvious that in the shelter of our house the snow is shallower than it is further down and I think at least some of this reflects where the wind has scoured away and redeposited the powdery snow.
I can imagine that there would be turbulence in the lee of our house with more slack spots further down the garden, sheltered as it is by hawthorn hedges.
I’m glad I made the decision to start feeding the birds again. There are no small mammal tracks around the bird feeders. The largest footprints are those of the pheasants. Other than my size 13s that is.
Hi Richard,
More lovely work on your blog today. I’m glad to see that you are feeding the birds again as they must surely need it. I wondered if you would like to write a guest blog to put on my site and include some of your wonderful drawings? Next month I am writing about trees in my garden so perhaps you could do a piece about the trees in yours. I can send you an advance copy if you are interested? Thanks Della
Lovely idea Della, look forward to reading the piece on your blog. If I get to write anything I’ll gladly exchange a post with you but I can’t make any promises as it looks as if it’s possible, just possible, that our long, long winter might have decided that at last it’s over. In which case I will definitely be heading for the hills and I’m afraid that the garden will probably have to settle for a little less attention. Not that I’ve been able to do anything the snow recently anyway.
Have you seen Nancy Ross Hugo’s book ‘Seeing Trees, Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Trees’ with photographs of fruits, leaves and twigs by Robert Llewellyn that remind me of Victorian botanical illustrations. Lovely book.