Hello and welcome to Gardening Bore 2021, hosted by me, your favourite gardening bore.

Some of our outdoor pots enjoying a winter holiday indoors.

For anyone who’s new to the Auntie Bulgaria blog, Gardening Bore is an annual traditional in which I:

• Throw myself enthusiastically into sowing veg and flower seeds in spring.
• Spam you with endless pictures of our bursting Bulgarian garden across June and July.
• Complain about having too many courgettes in August.
• Beg you for courgette recipes.
• Give up weeding in September and pretend not to notice the bindweed and invasive clover.
• Harvest my dozens of butternut squash and arrange them in descending order of size, like the Type A nutcase I am, sometime in October.
• Retreat into the house in November, and generally neglect the garden all winter before I…
• Start the whole process again in March with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a simple child with a short memory.

Yup, that pretty much sums it up.

But wait, isn’t it too soon to be starting Gardening Bore 2021? Yes, reader, yes it is. I don’t feel nearly ready to get back out there and start dealing with all the weeds I should have dealt with last autumn.

Trouble is, trying to control the garden’s timetable is like trying to control a wilful toddler. So when I noticed that our dahlia tubers were already beginning to sprout new growth from their tub of sand, I knew we didn’t have a say in the matter. Our lazy winter days were numbered. (Because of the cold winter temperatures here in Bulgaria, we dig up our dahlia tubers every autumn and store them in sand. Ordinarily, I’d pot them up in compost and start forcing the new growth in March – as opposed to just waiting to plant them straight in the ground in May – but this year they took it upon themselves to start growing in February. In sand.)

This meant we had to gather up some compost, clean the cobwebs off some pots and start potting up the dahlias about a month earlier than usual. While I was at it, I also took some cuttings from the new shoots to try and make more plants.

Dahlias in a rush to get growing.

We did all this at the kitchen table, which made a right old mess but was still preferable to putting on a jumper and actual shoes and working outside at the garden table. Hence the title ‘indoor gardening’. (Slogan: ‘Indoor gardening. Like ordinary gardening, but closer to the alcohol.’)

Indoor gardening is something we do quite a lot of across March and April, when it’s still too cold to sow seeds outside, but you need to get stuff going. The kitchen table is regularly dusted with compost. Our bedroom and my office (the only cat-free zones in the house) get taken over by pots of seedlings for at least six weeks, before being gradually moved outside when the temperatures level off.

Because it felt surprisingly nice to be doing some indoor gardening so early this year, we went on a bit of an indoor gardening bender, potting on a few neglected houseplants and taking cuttings where we could. We’re belatedly obsessed with houseplants and would spend every penny of our disposable income on houseplants if we could. In fact, allow me to bore you with a few houseplant pics.

Can’t recall the name of this one but it roots SO easily from cuttings.

Another one holidaying inside for the winter.

This umbrella plant is absolutely bomb-proof.

I wish we could have a jungle bathroom but, alas, it’s too dark.

So that’s it, folks. Consider Gardening Bore 2021 officially underway. I can only apologise in advance.