We have glorious weather in the garden today. It's so warm that seeds I thought I was optimistic to sow in my unheated greenhouse might actually germinate. I'm generally quite an optimistic gardener. I'm optimistic each year that I will keep up with the weeding and that some plants will survive onslaught by snails (actually, my optimism there is much more limited, and I've started googling the names of the plant with slugs before I buy anything for the front garden. If it can't survive slugs, it can't survive our garden). I also optimistically sowed other seeds that were out of date or close to it or for which I'd lost the label. These have been a bit of a mixed bag. Some have done better than others. My sunflowers (below), which are mainly in the greenhouse to give them a fighting chance to get big enough to withstand the snails when they go outside, are growing away very happily. Other pots remain resolutely empty (some of them labelled, some of them not - remembering to label is not my forte).
My yard-long beans have sprouted, and based on watching Alan Titchmarsh, I'm going to keep them in the greenhouse for as long as possible, as his more or less stopped growing when he planted them out. I'm hoping London's warmer weather will be a help, but I'm going to give them maximum greenhouse time first. I might even keep a couple in the greenhouse to see if that works, as my peppers and chilis have all failed to germinate this year, so I don't have as many plants for the greenhouse as I'd like. Most of the seeds were admittedly a couple of years old or self-collected.
My rhubarb's going from strength to strength. I still haven't dared to pick any yet, but I'm increasingly confident of getting at least one pie out of it. I love how it looks next to the pond. That was the perfect place to put it, and it seems not to be too bothered by the fact that it's living in partial shade.
This being April, it was time to finish getting the garden ready for the growing season. And when I got weeding and digging, quite a few birds showed up to take advantage of the creepy crawlies I'd exposed. The robins were particularly brave, swooping in to within less than a metre of me while I was working. I'm not sure how many we have, as I can't recognise individual robins other than the skinny robin (and there may be more than one of those), but I've seen two of them fighting it out in an aerial battle over the garden, so I think there may well be more than one. Our garden is also frequented by a mini-flock of about a dozen sparrows. They're not quite as brave as the robins, as humans walking about tends to send them scurrying for the bushes, but they will happily ignore us and carry on about their business on the ground if we're sitting in chairs. Maybe the sparrows have realised that beyond a certain age, humans just can't get up out of chairs at any decent speed, and the sparrows can be in flight before we can take even half a step towards them. This still doesn't explain the fearlessness of the robins. But then, maybe the robins have realised that they're not big enough to make a decent meal for us, so aren't worth chasing. Or maybe they've simply seen our Christmas cards and have realised how much we like them. Sparrow hobbies in the garden include taking dirt baths, eating the creepy crawlies, stealing string, flying about loudly – I never previously realised just how much noise sparrow wings make – sitting in next door's lilac tree watching our garden, chirping at each other or to the world in general, some noisy project in the eaves of our house (quite possibly raising young) and generally hanging out. They are a joy to watch, and I'm so glad they visit.
