Reluctant Writers and Hard Winters

You know when someone sends you an email, leaves a phone message or text and you don't reply immediately. A few days go by, a week, a month!  Before you know it you want to reply but it's been so long you don't know what to say!!

That's how I feel with this blog.

The reasons for not writing are numerous. Builders, sleepless babies,

It's not that I've not been doing anything, there's been so much I don't know quite where to start.

So I'll make this post a quick run down of the past 8 months (I've even had to look back on my last post to see where I left off).
So I was last seen pruning my red currants in the garden.  I chucked loads of compost from my hot composter around their bases in the spring and they are now covered in little green flowers.

There are so many red currants on the bushes that the branches are bowing.

Due to the dates of my kitchen build being changed, Grrrrr, I missed my course on winter pruning fruit trees. But I couldn't wait another year to go back so I read some of my copious gardening books, scoured the Internet, sharpened my tools and took a deep breath. By the time I had finished most of my apple trees were on the floor. My dear supportive husband came home took one look and said. "You've killed them".

Hard pruned Brambly apple tree to get it back to looking slightly like an espaliered tree.
 It was already tilting!

there was great relief when the apple tree began to bloom!

It was a long cold wintery wait til finally small green buds began bursting out all over the now much smaller trees.  (And yes I couldn't  help feeling smug when I pointed this out to Bjorn).

While he was convinced of my killing ability, Bjorn did put up my greenhouse on one of the coldest days of the year. So now that too is bursting with little green shoots in trays.  Some waiting for a place in my garden others of on a short journey to my allotment.

I haven't talked about my allotment for a while. (I haven't talked about anything for a long while, I hear you say).  I managed to plant onions, garlic and purple asparagus in the autumn.  But as you all know the winter has been, well how can I put it politely... Lets say I wouldn'teven put it in my composter.   Freezing, wet, and windy.   So there was not much action going on over at Wash Common.

Until finally there was a break in the weather, luckily my plot had not been under water for the cold season so I got to transplant one of my red currants and my summer raspberries. I also planted autumn raspberries, white and black currants.

This is turning into a list so I shall digress. The pond at the back of my allotment has a leak in the liner and has been dry all winter, even with all the rain. The problem is, no one told the frogs!  They laid masses of spawn in there, destined to dry up and stink.  So I commenced operation tadpole!

one dried up leaking pond, watch this space for how I'm going to restore it.

We have an old butler sink in the garden that I had ear marked for a dipping pond ages ago but never got around to it.   I'd been uming and ahing as to how to seal up the plug hole so I finally went and asked the experts at the pond shop. The simple solution was to get a piece of butile and some goldseal glue and glue the butile over the plug hole. Then I covered the bottom with pea gravel and with some old broken bricks creating steps up one side of the basin. Voila! A small and simple pond. Zooming back to the allotment I scooped up some frogspawn from the middle of the blob (so that it wasn't crispy and dry) and plopped it into the new pond with some oxygenating pond plants. And waited. And waited. And waited through two snow storms and multiple frosts where i was breaking the ice off the top. In fact i waited so long that I thought that it was dead and was starting to make up stories in my head as to how to explain the lack of tadpoles to Holly and Lottie. The one day the eggy goo had disappears and there were these tiny little tadpoles!  I don't know who was more excited me or the girls!

 

Holly calls them "Tampoles"
Lottie thinks we have Turtles in the garden.

 
Any way now they are massive and there are loads of them!  My slugs are not going to know what hit them!