The blossom this year is magnificent, if a little early. The plum is long gone, as is the peach, but the pear is out, the cherry is still going strong, and some early apple blossom is starting to show. My favourite of all is quince blossom and this should be about the last to show, but this year it is in advance I think, although totally gorgeous.
The honesty is also going from strength to strength and is a lovely foil to white and pink blossom.
Even the plant with the nicotine problem is doing nicely and flowering - when I recuperated it from a pile of stuff waiting to be burnt, it was pot-bound, tucked in with four other things, and had been used as an ashtray for at least 2 years. I cleaned off all the old soil, split it into four, potted each up and treated some as house plants and others as outdoor plants - round here they self-identify as preferring to be house plants. Anyway two survived and the bigger one is flowering again.
To make life easier on the kitchen garden, I have decided to ditch one of the plots and use part of it for raised beds, some of which will contain more perennial planting. So yesterday I spent time lifting the old weed suppressant matting and found a few baby slowworms.
Today I finally unpacked one of the raised bed packs and set it out to see how it worked, how tall it would be and how easily it fitted together. I was impressed that the pack included a weed suppressant mat, and won't be using the things that divide the square into 9, because I may not want it divided into 9. They will have the protection of my metal cages, which by some miracle seem to fit.
As we are now into April, I have taken down the bird feeder with camera included. It will go back out again in late September. Over the past two and a bit months, it has gathered in excess of 20,000 photo files (but only used a quarter of the SD card capacity), which I will spend the next while going through. I fully expect to delete something like 19,500 of the files as rubbish - out of focus, misted up, partial bits of bird, nothing of interest etc. A cursory glance at the contact sheet view of files hinted at something different to robins, great tits and blue tits, so I had a bit of a browse.
It's a bit in your face I know! I wasn't at all sure what it was, but I think this photo gives a good hint although misses some of the drama of the first photo.
I'd be interested to hear thoughts!
Anyway, it's not been the most exciting week as I have spent a lot of time being sat on by a recovering cat. At her first post-op appointment last week, the vet said she was doing very well, so clearly my role as cat mattress is working, and we all hope that she will soon be able to ditch the sunflower collar as the stitches dissolve.
Tonight there is reggae at the local pub, which continues the tradition of live music on Easter Sunday, so we shall need to be there, and not be square!
Have a good week and Happy Easter!
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