I have had five glorious days of gardening on the trot. It must be the longest run I've had at the garden in weeks, unbroken by rain, wind or illness, and I can scarcely believe it. I am rather stiff, but not so stiff today as I was yesterday, and there is a great deal of difference between the ache of muscles that have spent the day doing something enjoyable in the sunshine and fresh air, and the clammy ache of a cold.
It is now a race against time, to get as much ground mulched as possible before weed growth starts in earnest and the expanding foliage of my plants makes it difficult to apply soil treatments. The ideal I'm aiming at is for the leaves of the border's rightful inhabitants to do the work suppressing the weeds. It's getting close to that in places, but not everywhere, and even beds that are bulging with growth by late June have enough baldy, bare patches in April for little dandelion seedlings, ragwort and goose grass to snatch a toehold.
It is already difficult to walk on the borders without smashing things, the snouts of emerging bulbs, or tender folded leaf and flower buds of herbaceous plants that spend their winters firmly underground, and I wish I had done all this a month ago, but a month ago the weather was vile, and I felt quite shaky myself. I tread carefully, head down, watching where every footstep goes. It takes longer to apply the Strulch, too, as I have to shake each handful down around the leaves of the daffodils, grape hyacinths and alliums.
How do people manage who put a mower over their herbaceous borders in spring, or slash everything down with a scythe, or even burn it? Do they not have seedlings of ivy, and miniature oak trees popping up everywhere thanks to the jays and squirrels stashing acorns around their garden? And I must have the world population of the grass that specialises in seeding into the heart of mature, multi-stemmed shrubs, forming gradually expanding clumps in which every blade ends in a fat, tightly rooted base, so that the leaves come away in your hand, leaving the bottom of the plant to sprout again, safe in its woody fastness where you can't get your fingers under it, or work a trowel in among the branches. You wouldn't think that such a cunning and tenacious plant would be a rarity, but nobody else admits to having it.
Tending the borders is very urgent, but so too is to finish the pruning, before the plants waste their energies expanding their leaves, only for me to chop them off, and before the birds start building their nests. Once it is the nesting season that's the end of major cutting back until August, and even then I'm cautious about accidentally disturbing wasps nests. The time to hack into banks of brambles and other dense woody patches is when nothing is likely to be breeding in them.
I'd like to repot the dahlias as well. I meant to do it last year, and ran out of time as the snow went on into the last week of March. They put on a sorry show, and I thought then that I must get them into fresh compost in 2014, as they've been in the existing compost for years.
Cutting the lawn is a distant dream. It is still too wet. The top lawn squelched as I walked on it yesterday, which made me think I should not be walking on it, but I had to, if I wanted to get to the borders.
Despite the panic to get everything done at once, it is still a delight to be outside. The bees were foraging noisily in the Japanese quince outside the kitchen window, birds sang all around, and I saw the odd queen bumblebee out and about. Even the sound of the neighbouring farm finally starting their ploughing spoke hopefully of spring.
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