Not much to report at the moment as life is consumed (consumed!) by Brexit anxiety. (Joking. Sort of.)
At least there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful out in the sunshine, including…
1. Big birds are back
The storks have returned and taken up residence on telegraph poles in Etropole, as usual. Won’t be long before we see baby storks up in the nests.
2. Flowery floweriness
The primroses and plum blossom in the garden are extremely cheery, and the perennial flower border is beginning to wake up. I love it when all the plants emerge like a tight tapestry in spring, even though it’ll be weeks before I remember what everything is.
Also, after my last post, a reader asked what I meant by forcing dahlias, so here’s a pic of one of our dahlia tubers potted up in the house and starting to shoot. By the time the risk of frost has passed and we plant this bad boy out, he’ll be nice and bushy. I’ll also take cuttings from the young shoots to increase my stock of plants. Free plants, people, free plants.
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| Ignore the string. I tied that there before we dug up the tubers last year, to remind me to take lots of cuttings from this particular plant. |
We do a similar thing with our gladioli, in that we start them off indoors. Luckily, they’re quite happy just sitting in a shallow tray of water, which saves loads of pots and compost. Look closely and you can see roots growing from the bottoms and growth starting to shoot from the tops. They’ll easily be a foot tall by the time we plant them out.
3. Asparagus smugness
It’s here! Asparagus season is here! We picked our first crop of 2019 today, nattily arranged the spears by size (as you do), then made a delicious lunch of buttered asparagus, eggs and pesto on toast. We’ll be eating asparagus twice a week now until the beginning of June, and no doubt feeling very smug about it.
Elsewhere in the garden, this year’s garlic crop is looking good, and the rhubarb is getting bigger by the day.
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| Garleeeeek! |
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| Pleasingly, our rhubarb has also arranged itself in order of size. |
And now, I’m back off outside to enjoy the sunshine and distract myself from The Guardian’s Brexit live feed.
Your "gardening bore" posts are not boring at all.
I planted our first-ever asparagus about a week ago. We have some catching up to do on the gardening front. It does not help that I now have a full-time job in Sofia.
Good luck with your asparagus, Simon. The good thing about asparagus is, once it's established, it needs no attention at all except a bit of watering while it's producing spears and an annual spread of compost. It's one of the easiest things we grow! I wish there were more perennial vegetables that just came up every year without any effort.