It’s a gorgeous Easter Sunday and I just put a pot roast into the often with fresh rosemary and thyme from our own garden. Storm Dave rolled through yesterday and underwhelmed, at least in relation to others we’ve had. Today is sunny and calm, with just enough wind to watch the clouds drift by.
Spring blooms slowly here and the garden is just on the cusp of growth. There’s something calming about a seasonal change that eases its way in, as if it’s letting you acclimate to the warmer weather. We can look out our windows at plants that are almost fully leafed out…and others that just started to grow this week.
The gorse is thriving, as gorse does. The grass is a weed, and took another 2 hours of mowing on Thursday to corral to a manageable length. Strangest of all, the magnolia tree half-bloomed during earlier warm weather and decided to stop when the temperatures dipped back down. Oh well. Maybe next year we’ll get the full experience.
Across the creek we have a lovely, shaded hillside that’s filled with little white crocuses. It’s, handily, right out the window from my office and a serene space to watch. The grass underneath is shaggy, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to mow it so long as the flowers are there.
The chickens love days like this. They’re out of the coop early and take over the corner of the field that gets the morning sun. Someone (we think Raptor) has really gone to town on the opposite fence line and we’ll have to soon fill in their hovel lest they dig under the wire fencing that’s sunk into the ground to protect them from foxes.1
They appreciated the minor repair work I did on their watering system and the refill of feed (40kg lasts us about 2 months, which isn’t too bad).
What they didn’t appreciate was the time change last weekend. That threw off the timing of their gate (which automatically opens and closes at set times to keep them safe). Wednesday and Thursday I went out there at twilight to find Toastie hanging around outside. I felt unreasonably proud of outsmarting the little hen to get her back inside without letting any others out. Friday we fixed the gate timer and everyone got into the coop of their own volition.
This week we have loads of mulch and gravel set to arrive. We’ll replace the straw in the polytunnel with a simpler bark mulch and gravel combo. The straw did little to suppress weeds and was not particularly pleasant to walk on so we wanted to swap it out.
There’s also a bunch of compost mulch that’ll go into the raised beds. Once that’s done we have lettuce, bok choy, carrots, broccoli, 4 varieties of tomatoes, kale, arugula, and more ready to plant. Somehow all that will only fill up about half our raised beds, but we wanted to start at a reasonable level this year.
- As an aside, we definitely have foxes around as one got a mourning dove sometime last week. Our clue? An explosion of feathers under one of the hedgerows. ā©ļø
