Spring is here

What a joy it is to wake up in the morning to the sight of sunshine and the sound of birdsong! One of the biggest distractions I referred to in yesterdays post is the garden. I have various projects afoot, one of which is to start deciding what to sow in my vegetable plot this year. On one of my festival forays last summer I picked up a pack of seeds for a Siberian variety of tomatoes, Aurora. I haven't had much success with tomatoes so far but I have great hopes for this year. After all, if a plant can thrive in Siberia it can surely cope with an Irish summer. Anyway, I sowed the seeds yesterday and am now eagerly awaiting the first tiny green shoots.

Another experiment was to try to overwinter my chili plants. They were planted rather late from a pack of mixed seeds that came free with a magazine. They all produced some chilis, all shapes and sizes, but not enough. So, I decided to try to keep them alive over the winter so as to get off to a very early start this year. Unbelievably, it seems to have worked. I started off with thirteen plants, four died :-( so I have nine left. I repotted them yesterday into a soil/compost mix. A couple look dubious but the rest are showing signs of regrowth. One even has a flower bud!

The big project for this Spring is to create a Spring / Winter garden in my sister's front garden. It's a semi-woodland area and has some great trees there already including a copper beech and a couple of green beeches. There's also a cherry and I've just put in another cherry and a crab apple. There's loads of Ash (they literally grow like weeds around here, we're always having to remove them from flowerbeds) and there are far too many sycamore saplings even though I've already removed about 50 of them!

The photos give an idea of what the area looks like. It backs onto a heavily wooded portion of the neighbour's garden so the whole area should be a great wildlife area. It's also one of the places in the garden that gets really good winter sun which put the idea in my head to try to create a winter garden. I've started a hellebore patch and planted loads of tete-á-tete daffs and grape hyacinths in the Autumn. These are just coming into bloom now. There are already primroses (the wild variety) scattered around especially in the bank from the upper to the lower level.

The rockery bit bordering the drive was an afterthought when the sis built a garage last year. There's a bit of soil erosion going on there so, as it's south facing, we're going to fill it with mat forming alpines for a bit of summer colour and to stabilise the ground. It's been filled with lovely sandy soil unlike the claggy clay and builders rubble that comprises the rest. So far all that's in there are a few lonely looking aubretia plants and more daffs. I really want to keep the woodland bit full of native species, wood anemones, lords 'n ladies, bluebells, and the hellebores of course. I have a very clear picture in my mind of how I want it to look but it's going to be a while until it gets there. Something to look forward to.