Progress on the garden has stopped now. After the rain, and the cold, and the snow, I have decided it is a good time to do all the indoor things that I have been neglecting for the sake of the garden, and wait until the temperature is warm enough to go out without my hands going numb inside my fur-lined gardening gloves. In the meantime, here are some cheering pictures.
Christmas Rose
Cornus and snow
I think I remember a fairy story I read many years ago about someone who had to find some impossible things, and I am sure that one of them was ‘blackberries in February’. Well, perhaps I can help out with that. These photographs were taken this morning, and so with current light levels, February doesn’t seem that unreasonable.
This blackberry plant flowered in September and the fruit is ripening well.
Blackberries close up
My own progress has been slow, however. Now I have not only rain, but Christmas to contend with. I have had to take time away from the garden to do boring things like buying Christmas cards, but it cannot be helped. So I am cancelling the January milestone, and I am going to stop getting stressed about it and just laugh at my garden’s lack of biological competence. It’s not just the blackberry. The rose and the osteospermum have buds. And when I was clearing away some wet leaves, a large frog jumped out. I think I am going to have to sing lullabies to the amphibians this year if there is to be any chance of them hibernating.
Last month was the wettest November since 1914. It was also a frost-free November. Our first frost of the winter happened overnight on 30 November to 1 December, and it was something of a shock. My remaining tomato plant finally died, but some of the pelargoniums took no notice of the frost and decided to carry on anyway.
So there hasn’t been much progress. I put in a good session this morning because it wasn’t raining. It was cold, though. Even at midday there was still frost on the grass and bits of ice around. I dug up the nearer of the two euonymuses at one of the corners of the new lawn. I decided that it had to be moved because it was planted at the wrong level and therefore might have interfered with the construction of the lawn edge. Although digging up evergreens in the winter is not normally a great idea, I think the plant was grateful because it was sitting in such a waterlogged area. It was hard to dig it up because the soil I removed kept being replaced with water. At one stage I thought I would lose one of my wellies, but fortunately I was able to pull it out of the quagmire. I trimmed the plant’s roots and branches back a lot and stuffed it in a pot. I also broke up some path that was going to get in the way of the new lawn. I saw the steam come off the paving as I bashed it with the pickaxe.
I am not sure whether I will be ready to go ahead with the next stage of the building works in January. If more rain is on the way, as looks likely, I may have to delay the project. There is nothing I can do about this. I have worked very hard on the project in the dry days of September and October, and have neglected other things to spend time in the garden. Also, I have been looking up the cost of materials, and the work could be more expensive than I can afford at the moment, so that’s another reason to delay it.