Sunny Sunday... and seeds

I love a sunny Sunday. Especially with a good back and two loads of laundry ready to hang out by the time I've cooked and eaten breakfast and washed up! Today's garden adventure started with an inspection first. There are daffodils coming out all around the garden, even in the neglected pot down by the shed. I love daffodil season, to me it says that the worst of winter is over.

My £3.99 Lidl apple tree (Cox Orange Pippin) has broken open its buds and there are leaves unfurling. This is very exciting. My pear tree (the Beurre Hardy) is still asleep, although when I see the branches look stick-like and shrivelled I do have a sinking feeling that it might be dead. But I won't give up hope yet.

My fruit bushes (the new gooseberry from Lidl and the redcurrant from Homebase) are still alive. They haven't grown much but neither are they dying, so that's good. The autumn fruiting raspberries (that fruited all through summer last year) have new leaves forming on the cane stumps (I realise they should have been cut to ground level if they really are autumn fruiting but I just couldn't do it). The other canes (again, from Lidl!) are still more like sticks but I can see there is potential for life to spring out from them. One or two sticks do actually have green showing on them so again, all good. I gave them all a good watering.

No life showing on the oca beds yet (but it's only been a week). One of the beds has been used as a cat toilet (ugh!). The asparagus trench has also been used as a toilet by some animal. I'm assuming it's not my cat - I like to believe he goes and makes his toilet in someone else's garden!

A close check on the wisteria that I hatched from seeds from next door's vine last year revealed that they are not dead, no! They were in fact just sleeping through the winter and are now budding up into life again. This is good news! I thought I'd killed them! I might try hatching some more plants from the seeds I've had stored in the kitchen for the last 2 months. I could probably give them to the gardening club show for sale.

I repotted my new strawberries into bigger pots and put them out by my other strawberry pots. Some of the runners I cut and transplanted are looking a little sickly but I can see at the heart of the plant there are new green leaves coming up on most of them so I don't for a minute believe they are all going to die.

I moved by little plastic greenhouse from it's place of permanent shade by the back door to the patio where it at least gets some sun in the morning. I filled up some seedling pots with compost and put them in there - no seeds yet, but will be handy for during the week if I feel like planting some more seeds.

Ah yes seeds! I grabbed a handful from the seed cache on the dining room table (I really must do something about that one day soon) and did some planting out by the pond and the redcurrant. Rather than write up little plastic markers for them all I just drew a little map and wrote down what I put in:

• Calendula


• Lettuce (salad bowl)


• Statice purple


• Cornflower blue


• Larkspur


• Red Sun sunflower


• "mystery seeds"


• Scabious red


• Aster


• Nemophilia

To stop neighbourhood cats (or foxes) seeing this nicely dug area as a catty-latrine, I've fenced it off with sticks.

Just along from here, I dug out a small area, sieved the soil back in and planted some Parsnips. The seeds are a year out of date, but I am forever hopeful of them springing new life.

I'm seeing Amanda again today - we're going to compare our choices from the Thompson and Morgan £5 free catalogue so we don't duplicate our choices.