winter gardening

Last night's wind blew one of the acrylic panes out of the greenhouse.  Fortunately it didn't break, but it is a two person job getting them in again, and so I had to drag the poor old Systems Administrator out into the cold.  The wind had slammed the lid of one of the cold frames open, and as I shut it again I saw the first daffodil shoots nosing their way clear of the compost.  I ordered fifty of the true pheasant's eye last summer to go by the wildlife pond in the meadow, and they are currently growing on in pots so that I can see where to put the clumps when everything else is coming up as well.  I have done a few clay pots of fancier varieties as well, to stand by the front door.

Returning to the sloping bed in the back garden once the rain had passed I found more emerging daffodil snouts.  For all that the days are still short, damp, and cold, the garden is hurtling back towards life.  That is one of the reasons why I have never found January a particularly depressing month, as long as I don't have a cold and it doesn't rain or snow all the time.  There is always lots to do, and every time I manage a session in the garden I find something else has started sending out its first hopeful leaves.  Of course the more starts to come up the more difficult it is to tread on the borders without squashing something, so it is an urgent time of year.  Which reminds me, I must prune the grape vines, just as soon as I've trickled oxalic acid on the bees.

In the current pots by the front door the little viola 'Honey Bee' is flowering madly, and has been ever since I planted it, undeterred by the snow, the wind, or anything else.  Meanwhile, the large flowered mahogany coloured pansies that I bought late in the season, because I wanted to test the new Littlethorpe pot outside through the winter before deciding whether to order a set and the garden centres had pretty much run out of bedding by the time the pot arrived, have not made any new flowers at all beyond the one each that they already had when I got them.  Perhaps they will do better come the spring, but for winter long interest the violas have it.  Some mauve and white ones I got for the pot by my mother's front door are doing equally well.  'Honey Bee' was highlighted as a promising new variety in a 2013 trial by Which?, and Which? got it absolutely right.  The flowers are a strange and pretty mixture of purple and mustard green.

The row of slightly tender white cyclamen in the porch were looking rather tatty the last time I examined them closely.  I must deadhead them and remove the odd shrivelled leaves.