sNOw GARDENING TODAY

White flakes are driving across the garden from the east, pausing and scattering in disorganised fashion, then resuming the urge to go west. Tree trunks are white on the eastern side impaled by the soft snow.
Spring is here - well, came yesterday with the equinox.

The heron has been back and now the mallard are mopping up for breakfast. They know, obviously, that I am not a very early riser. The frogs have survived under the mesh protection I put across one corner of the pond and under that are large clumps of spawn.

Now the wind is whipping the flakes up into a maelstrom, swirling, driving, eddying all at once. (Read Robert Frost's poem). The gnome has an extra hat, shawl and is slowly disappearing from the feet up. In the wood the statue of the small boy looks cold and lonely.

I have been bereft this week - how one depends on a wheelbarrow - because of a puncture. So I did the logical thing - bought a new inner tube over the internet and then mended the old one with a bicycle repair kit. Having done that I am back to more barrowing of manure. The cutting bed is now completed and ready. (Cutting for cut flowers not cuttings though you never know, I might use it for both).
I am a very much lesser form of Gorbachev having impaled my forehead on a branch of the pear tree - just a scabby patch, not a birthmark.

Still only the odd daff.

I notice in the Gazette that this weekend Dora's Fields at Rydal (William Wordsworth stuff, daffs in hosts) are open. People will enjoy all the leaves I am sure.

The walkway through the boggy area is repaired but only for this year. I am cogitating, (NO, cogitating), about getting in a lad with a digger and excavating the garden bottom, putting in  a proper liner and having a gurt pond rather than a li''le un. (Pardon lapse into local dialect).
But then I would have to get into waders rather than Wellies (capital letter for the Duke) - concrete? That is not very Eco is it? So not concrete, then bog? And let it go?
You may have noticed that my hold on English grammar has departed (not that it ever arrived). Watching the snow go around and around, (old men of Aran and such? (prize for the source of that bit of lateralness)), has confuddled me.


Pots means plants.
Hence plastic tubs waiting for carrots, upturned bottomless flowerpots with copper tape around the middle protecting the broccoli and my rhubarb forcing pot (£1 at a house sale many years ago) in the rhubarb bed.

So I have lit the wood burner, have a coffee, feet up and a bit of thrillery words - no, Paul Temple, Lee Child, Reg Hill, Ian Rankin . . . I think I will return to the ultimate fireside read with John Macnab by Buchan - and as I am on a diet - again! - a sweetener and a banana.

Bananas are 0 points! Mmm!