A day of spring.

First of the Tulips.

To say the weather has been variable might be an understatement, we did manage ten continuous days without rain during the middle of March, enabling gardening work to get done, such as potato planting, but since then we have had rain just about every day. Today however was an exception, it was spring! Long may it last. We took the opportunity to have a trip out to our favourite woods expecting to find Wood Anemones out but not a sign,

but there were some early Bluebells,

Our favourite Bluebell wood.

another week or so and this wood will be a carpet of blue, why the Anemones should be late is another question

as we found another wood,

Such a beautiful flower.

a new one to us which is carpeted in white, and although there are the leaves of bluebells showing none were in flower yet.

So far it has been a strange year for plants and flowers, we had our first daffodils out on the 24th January and there are still lots of daffs. to come. We grow a lot of different varieties at least twenty different ones which probably explains the long flowering period. Fruit and veg wise things are slow this year,

Lots of bloom but no fruit yet.

 strawberries in the tunnel have been blooming for two month now but no fruit has yet set, for us that is late, we have a variety that normally will give us fruit the first week of April, yet the Rhubarb was very early we had our fist picking the second week in February.

 Even the potatoes in the tunnel have been very slow but they are at last making headway,

likewise the broad beans, but they have at last formed flowers.

Spinach seedlings.

Spinach has been sown and has germinated well

and cauliflower seedlings have also been transplanted into the tunnel. We seem to have seed trays and modules everywhere, waiting to be planted out or potted on, thankfully we have the green house so our window ledges don't become littered with seedlings.

The garden is looking lovely, it is now four years old and is showing some maturity,

the rockery also is looking lovely, although we should have given a little more though on it's construction, it's very hard to get to the back of it to weed as it up against a fence.

We have put some Muscovy duck eggs into the incubator they should be hatching the first week of may, Muscovy eggs are notoriously hard to hatch in an incubator, we normally manage a reasonable hatch, it remains to be seen how well we do this year. We will also be getting some Hubbard day old chicks, probably early in May, depending on how good or bad the weather is by then.

Another beautiful sunset.