And So It Begins

Well here we are, my favourite time of the year, the blessed spring when everything is waking up and  bursting with life and I can start digging my fingers in the soil and growing vegetables and preparing  le potager. The winter here is long and cold so every tiny little flower I spotted in the early spring, lifted my spirits while I toiled in the garden turning the soil. Except, in fact,  this year I'm not doing much of turning really, since I prepared the veggiebeds in the autumn, losely following the permaculture principles. Which is to say that I just piled on sticks, leaves, manure and hay in layers like a lasagne and let it stew all winter, ready for planting in the spring. I shall report the results of all that in due course.

So the incessant and manic following of the weather has started, as well as all things plant-related. Every morning I am checking the weather channel the first thing, and hereafter several times a day, keeping a beady eye on the horizon at the same time, just to make sure I might divine the weather god's moves for the day. Despite the endless checking and cloud-gazing, the weather has proved to be tricky to predict this spring. We got some extremely warm and lovely weather already in April/May, but after this promising start things have gone a bit sideways and the weather has been stubbornly cold, windy and rainy again.

The first few bursts of warm weather got me all excited and I just might have started the gardening ball rolling a wee bit too early, I have to admit, but the gardeners are by nature optimists and I figured I would be a fool not to get a good headstart to the growing season. If it's all been in vain and my work will vanish with a surprise frost or hailstorm, so be it. I would just have to start all over again. But, we're not there yet, so I shall face the future with rose-red glasses firmly planted on my nose and keep thinking positive.

I emptied every seed packet and filled every available windowsill space with little pots on rainy days when it was impossible to work in the garden. Here are my tomato seedlings (all from the last year's tomatoes) coming on, newly moved onto slightly bigger pots.

One bow fell on the floor by accident but most of the seedlings seemed to have survived this freeky test of life force, luckily!

Mon Cheri managed to get the required extension ready in record time, so we might indeed have space for all my tomatoes. I did plant quite a few...mind you, it's good to have reserves in case of other accidents or similar mishaps!

Here they are, first ones in! Grow well, for I have done everything I can to make you a nice home.

I am not a morning person but maybe it is just a question of motivation....

While waiting for the extension being built, I had a job of painting all the wooden parts to protect them from the elements. My favourite!

The roof of the old greenhouse.

Between the painting and garden work, I started to fashion a fence from branches and sticks next to a bench I made earlier. It's not terribly pretty but it might work as a sort of wind barrier anyway.

I ran out of space to plant potatoes so I had to start digging the grass up on the first terrace. I knew I wouldn't get off so easily when it came to digging and turning the ground, there's always something...

Even the bees have started their work now, so I am not the only early bird. Or a bee, in this case. And the neighbour's fruit trees still have all their flowers. Just looking for any hopeful signs that the summer's on its way.

Despite having been cold and wet enough, this winter was milder than normally, the thermometer dropping no lower than -7 °c. Few neighbours though put the fear in me by talking about the late frost which was 'a sure thing' but this 'sure thing' never arrived and I can finally breathe normally again. Oh, the gardener's woes!

This other beastie is apparently a pine processionary, spotted on a nearby field. Fatal to the pine trees and painful to anybody touching it. I didn't. Even my curiousity knows its boundaries.