We have a friend who sometimes says on her Facebook page that she has lost a day. Well, for me I lost a whole month. I mean, where did February go? January seemed endless and yet here we are mid-March. The horta, however, has not weeded or pruned itself so I must have done something down there! Richard recently strimmed everywhere and it does look so much better, with lots of cleared, empty beds waiting to be filled.

But, as always in the gardening world, it’s win some, lose some. I dug up the horseradish recently. It has never done really well, and no fear of it spreading, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised to discover that the roots had gone rotten. It was just beginning to sprout but there was nothing edible. It seems to be one of the easiest plants to grow but, unlike most of the plants I shove in the ground, it wasn’t happy. There is a slight dip in the ground where it was planted and despite the good drainage perhaps it just got too much water. Ah well. I did manage to save a couple of small roots that looked okay and have put them elsewhere. We’ll see.

So on a more positive note the asparagus is shooting up, a mixture of great stocky stalks and thin lanky stems, all very tasty though. Plus, although I have always known that broccoli (calabrese) gives out extra shoots having had the main stalk cut, I hadn’t realised how long they do this for, and just how big the off-shoots become. We have been eating from plants put in the garden from the summer, a real cut-and-grow-again veg.

Meanwhile the temperatures are hitting the high 20s, during the day of course. But those lovely clear skies are still giving us frosts at night, and more than just ground frost. This has meant every evening all the seedlings have to be put away at night, not a small task now that most things have germinated and been potted on. We bought one set of plugs, some beans, and I chose to leave those out. Well, the outer leaves have been frost bitten, I’m just hoping they’ll be okay. Then of course every morning out everything comes again. There’s something very exciting about this time of the year though, all those little seedlings bursting through the soil. I look at a tiny purple sprouting broccoli and glance over at the four sown last year, over a metre tall and almost ready to eat, and am always amazed.

Oh and we have also bought some more ‘roasties’ and 4 more ducklings, but they’re another story…