Green Girl Gardener

It looks so nice outside, the sun’s shining bright and people walking past our house aren’t all togged up in hats and scarves. Unfortunately we’re still in self isolation until midnight tonight so we can’t go for a walk to soak up the sun, but, we can go in the garden. It’s still a bit chilly and damp for me to be tempted to do any actual gardening but I am gearing up for it. I can feel the enthusiasm creeping back in!

I suspect my first point will feature in many Sixes this week. Daffodils! Finally the first of them have opened out so we can see their beautiful faces.

Isn’t that just a photo of pure joy? I just love love LOVE daffodils and everything they stand for! As far as I’m concerned, the only downside to daffodils is that they’re poisonous to cats so I can’t fill our house with vases and vases of their beautiful yellowness! Even the water that they’re kept in becomes poisonous to cats as I found out to my dismay when our pussy cat Willow drank it some years ago. Willow’s not with us anymore (not because of the daff incident) but I still feel guilty that drinking the water made her poorly. Daffs must be really poisonous because the water literally made a reappearance within a matter of minutes, if not seconds.

Speaking of our feline friends …..

….. this one doesn’t belong to us (our girls are house cats) but he (we think) visits our garden every day and he’s learnt to trust us and happily strolls up for head rubs and fuss. He does have an owner (he wears a collar) and is obviously well cared for because his fur is always well groomed but he seems to enjoy our garden. We’re animal lovers so we do encourage wildlife to visit our garden whenever we can.

According to Monty Don, you should be able to organise your garden and its eco-system so that it all supports itself and you should have minimal issues with pests because the birds will eat the lily beetle larvae and the ladybirds will eat the aphids etc. etc. However, despite the aforementioned black cat’s best efforts, squirrels are far too quick and clever to be caught, which means they just carry on carrying on with their daily business largely unfettered.

This is evidenced in the above photo. All week, from my home office, I’ve been watching a squirrel diligently gathering grass and carrying it off to next door’s jungle presumably to build a drey. I was hoping it was doing me a favour by clearing all the dead fronds to save me a job, but, no! It’s been busily decimating my festuca intense grasses. Cheeky squirrel! It’s a good job he’s cute. Hopefully the grasses will recover and we’ll see baby squirrels soon.

Last weekend I did do a little bit of actual gardening until it started raining.

I repotted my blueberry bush. Luckily I had some ericaceous compost leftover from last year in the shed. It’s showing signs of regrowth this week so I’m hopeful that I might get lots of antioxidant rich blueberries in a few months.

I took delivery of three raspberry canes last week and I planted them in our raised bed and now I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I tried to grow raspberries a couple of years ago and they just died on me. Someone told me they don’t like to be planted too deep so I’ve planted these ones just enough to cover their roots. Someone else told me that cutting the canes to fifteen centimetres after they’re planted can encourage off shoots so I’ve hedged my bets and cut two of them but left one as it was when it arrived. I really hope I get some raspberries this year.

Finally for this week, is a little bit of cuteness! This Harry Potter meerkat has been keeping watch over my sempervivum pot for a couple of years. You can see in the second photo what the pot looked like when I bought it. More than half of the plants didn’t make it through last winter and the survivors looked a bit sad in the original big pot, so I decided to repot it in my wicker sheep.

That’s that for this week. I’m off to check out other Sixes now at the Propagator’s blog and after that I may go and wander round the garden dreaming of tomorrow’s freedom!