Goodness what a long time it’s been since the last post! I must admit to having become very lazy when it came to writing on the blog for the last couple of months. I blame it all on the winter hibernation and many other distractions. I wanted a break from the garden and outdoor work and try the lifestyle of a cat (in terms of lounging and sleep anyway). What’s happened since the last post? Well, we’ve had christmas with the parents, New Year with the neighbours, we’ve visited friends, visited relatives, visited lots of restaurants, had family gatherings and I’ve been rediscovering many indoor, rainy-day activities that I had given up during the summer for the garden.
There’s also been such a great deal of rain this winter that we’ve had to moor boats off the patio. Outside work isn’t nice when it has to be done form a pontoon in the cold. So instead, I’ve been indulging indoors and in between lounging around, doing a 1500-piece jigsaw, dreaming of the garden, playing computer games and baking, I set the blog writing on the back-burner, telling myself that I would come back to it “later”, the temptation to either sleep or play once again winning over the feeling that I should try going outside and perhaps do a bit of pottering; if only it wasn’t so wet.
This is a shot taken a week or two ago. I’m stood on the grass path half-way down the garden, at the mid-way point of the semi-circular border to the left and the middle border to the right. The water level is so high it’s actually at the grass surface. Lower border plants are inundated while the ones higher up are in an island surrounded by saturated soil. The garden drains very, very slowly and although the raised borders might stop many plants from drowning, there’s not much that can be done to shift this quantity of water through without major and expensive drainage works, that might damage the line of trees at the bottom of the garden.
While I ponder on the idea of a “rain garden” to help channel the water away and blog plants to have in the worst affected areas, I’ve actually managed to do a couple of jobs outside while the weather has been less awful:
- Maintained the plants in the greenhouse
- Cleared the patio, ready for a clean
- Weeded, weeded and the weeded some more
- Done miles of border edging
- Moved the rubbish off the polythene for the border we will be creating this year
- Sorted out several patio pots
There’s nothing ground-breaking in that short list and I don’t mind at all. This year’s winter hibernation has been very welcome and I’ve actually discovered there’s a life outside gardening (believe it or not) and I’m going to continue enjoying it until the days start to lengthen, the garden starts to dry and the first plants of spring begin to flower. At that point, the call of the garden will get louder and louder and I’ll be drawn outside once more, ready to face the new season, to get creating new borders, sowing, dividing and growing more plants and just rediscovering gardening again.
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