STRAWBERRIES AND SCREAM

Saturday -

I have just been out to top up the bird food and the sun is out. (Forecast is for storms and rain again Sunday.) The song thrush is belting out its call for the first time. It repeats a phrase 3 or 4 times, then another phrase and another and so on.

The garden is beginning to bloom - purple crocus, pulmonaria (lungwort for the spotted leaves that look like a nasty disease), tulips and daffodils pushing through everywhere.

Yesterday afternoon a parcel arrived with twenty small strawberry plants, especially ten Cambridge Favourite. These are now in the preprepared bed inside the rabbit proof fence. Eighteen inches apart and in rows three feet apart they will probably not give fruit this year. In fact it may be wise to nip out the flowers to let the plants build up strength. (Might have to make one or two exceptions.) So we will, I hope, have three years of fruit before the virus comes. This reminds me the raspberries need replacing because of a virus infection.

The strawberries will have to be netted and straw placed between the rows to keep the berries off the ground. I will do this in early June after the last chance of frost. Mind you, if I am pulling off the flowers there will be no fruit so may not have to do all that this year. The plants will need regular watering as they do not like to be too dry.

I do a bit of the old photography and have a site on Flickr -http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncandarbishire/

I received a message from the continent from someone wanting to use one of my pics in a catalogue. Being mercenary I kindly asked what they were thinking of paying for it.
Funny, I have not received any further communication from them.

Even the kitchen garden is stirring. The red tops of the rhubarb are showing. Mind you, friends down by the sea, three miles away and a hundred metres lower, have almost reached a height where they can eat it. (I do not mean they have reached a height, the rhubarb has . . .)

Now why, you might say, has he put scream in the title.
The answer is - I have no idea. It just seemed a good title.

Actually there are times when I could scream - being a gardener does have its agonies - and I do not mean backache, thorns in fingers and so on - when the slugs go rampant, the pigeons eat all the newly planted seedlings, the mower gets stuck in a ditch, I realise the banking is a sea of bindweed, hammer my thumb instead of a staple, R asks me to move the stream I have spent two weeks digging etc etc.
And we have still not decided to do with the twenty box plants I bought in the autumn. They sit in their pots by the cold frame looking cast aside.

Sunday - they were right, gales and rain, inside messing on computer, going over seeds - when to sow what and so on.

Wild day. This is how it looks from the house on a good day!!

The big buildings are Heysham Power Stations - bit of the old nuclear you know - help light up my life!