Blooming March.

Our gardens are now a sea of daffodils

,

And yet more daffodils.

yellow is everywhere, with the odd flash of blue or red.

Blue from Hyacinths, purple and blue from anemone and crocus

and red from the Camellias.

We should have colour from the Daffodils for some time as the doubles and the whites seem to be far behind the yellows.
The frogs have been busy, the spawn has taken up around a quarter of our pond, if just fifty% survive we will be overrun with frogs.

Both of our peach trees are now in full bloom

and have been hand pollinated twice, the apricot tree now has it's leafs. We have had two pickings from the tunnel grown spinach, something I can never have enough of, but our p.s.b (purple sprouting broccoli) is very slow, the shoots are forming but not as quickly as we would have liked.
 The lemon tree produced eleven beautiful fruits for us and is now just coming into flower, I hope we will get as many this year, the flavour and sweetness from a freshly picked lemon is worth waiting for.
The last two weeks have been busy, the time has mainly been taken up because of several hospital appointments for both of us, with more to follow. I am awaiting an overnight stay for sleep study plus a visit to a cardiac specialist. This is due to my  COPD specialist convinced that something other than the COPD is at work. No doubt, in time, the problem will be sorted, maybe it is just old age. I have gone from someone who would not even take an aspirin to a person who now has to take six different types of drugs. I've never been a fan of Doctors, I have always considered them as legalised drug pushers, and certainly the drugs I'm on don't seem to be helping, it all seems very hit and miss.

We did manage to fit in a visit to friends in Mayo, taking a detour we came across a lovely river in full spate,

we did have quite a bit of rain in the first few days of March, I imagine this river is normally a gentle flowing stream.
The weather is variable at the moment but certainly  spring like, with new plants awaking from their winter slumber. 

Four seasons in a day.

A spring bouquet.

Normally you would have to go traveling to experience four seasons in a day, but not this year, most days of last week  gave us a variety of seasons. From warm, at times quite hot, t-shirt type weather to hail or even snow showers an hour or so later, plus some rain thrown in for good measure, no wonder the garden doesn't know what the season is. Asparagus has given us a couple of spears then frost stopped growth and we had to recover the plants with crop cover.

Strawberries in bloom in the tunnel for the past two months, and only now have we ripening fruit, a month later than we would normally have our first pickings,

but the broad beans are looking good and also the early tunnel potatoes.

 The Camellias which should have flowered February/March are only now flowering. We just hope that the weather becomes a little more stable so the plants can get on with growing.

The daffodil season has been very extended this year, we had the first ones out on the 24th January and we still have some just in bud,

this might be partly due to so many different varieties that we have growing,

well over twenty different ones, a lot of them are perfumed.

I love these daffs, called Twinkling Yellow, the blooms are only the size of my thumb nail.

They have been spectacular this year.

Not too much slug damage to the leaves.

The other plants that have done very well are the Trout lilies, they have multiplied from last year which is fine, I just love them.

The weeds on the pathway are parley.

Things are coming on well in the tunnel including the weeds,

I now count parsley as a weed as it has self-seeded and the pathways are covered with seedlings.

The peach tree has a reasonable amount of fruit set on it, but not too much, so we wont need to thin out the fruitlets.

Another favourite Daff, and it's perfumed.

I don't know where the time goes, it seems to fly by, it's hard to believe that we are nearly half way through the year, maybe gardening makes the time fly, everything does seem to revolve around what is ready for harvesting or what needs planting out.

All the hens and ducks are laying well, we now have a glut of eggs, well over what we need for our customers so we are freezing quite a lot of these eggs, beaten and then frozen they will be good for a year.

I have also made some lemon curd, I will do another batch in the next few days.
We have now just about come to the end of the winter veg,

Last of the parsnips, this years have already germinated.

we've had our last parsnip and have now used our last onion but the ones in the tunnel should be ready by the end of May. We still have carrots plenty of chard and the first of this years spinach will be ready in a few days, so not too big a hungry gap.
A few more photos of the Daffodils.

And a couple of photos of the garden.

Freesias.

Wild Violets.