It's spring in the garden

The spring flowers are really starting to come in to their own and the garden is full of birds! Last week I drew this picture of one of the blue tits that has been feeding from our bird feeder. I am going to try and catalogue the birds coming in to the garden in this way – which hopefully will also help me to learn to distinguish one from the other!

It has been a while since our last post but a combination of a week’s holiday and catching up with the spring cleaning means that we haven’t done much of interest. This weekend however we have finally started to work on the garden again. The beds have been dug ready for the coming year’s vegetables and the last of the winter vegetables are being used up. Still in the ground are a few swedes, parsnips, white cabbage, sprouts and leeks. The salad crops that we planted a few weeks ago (in our winter salad experiment) are doing well and I think next weekend will be a perfect time to pot them up. I also need to start planting the first seeds of the year.

Today we have spent a bit of time preparing the beds by digging out any weeds and stones and forking in the compost from last year’s grow bags. I have also done some weeding in the flower beds to get out the dandelions and nettles while they are still relatively small.  

I have always found it interesting that the best thing for a nettle sting is to rub a dock leaf on it and that (conveniently) dock leaves and nettles often grow together. This week I learnt a new fact about nettles from mum – apparently the first sting of the year (which I got today) genuinely does feel worse than later in the year because your body gets accustomed to the sting. So each time you are stung it hurts less than the last time - I still think I will be avoiding it at all costs but interesting fact none the less!