Hot sweet pea

Today I sowed some sweet peas (Anniversary and Bouquet) - a fragrant summer staple. The weather is unseasonably hot. It must be summer now, officially, as the neighbours' hot tub has been switched on. It's like living next to an angry fridge-freezer on speed. Such unecessary whining (not me, the hot tub). I don't understand them at all. Here is some apple blossom from my mini tree; apple trees all around have been particularly laden with it this year.

Sunflowers this year

Today I sowed some sunflowers: Russian Giant, Velvet Queen, and some non-specific freebie ones from a publisher (strapline: Grow Your Research). Sunflowers are great - cheery, bold and beautiful. I didn't get around to sowing any last year, but a spectacular plant shot up in the front garden without any input from me. Here it is, with bee. I enjoyed it immensely.

Up and away..

Forgive the appalling dad-style title; put it down to the euphoria I feel at keeping to a self-imposed challenge for more than 24 hours. I sowed some rocket (hah!) in the greenhouse, and pulled some brambles up to boot. The wallflowers have been flowering for at least three weeks now, and they are still looking big and bountiful but curiously unphotogenic. I grew them from seed two years ago, and nothing much happened with them last year. Today my colleague explained to me that they are biannual. There's a gardeny word. If I'd realised their biannualness before now I could have grown some more last year. Oh well.

Catching up

When I said 'sporadic' I meant less sporadic than this. Despite being neglected the garden has flourished in the warm spring and rewarded me with bountiful displays of daffodils, tulips, and wallflowers. I'd forgotten I had planted so many tulips, and they are all fabulous. I stopped whingeing about cat turds, and got out there a couple of times during the last two week-ends to tidy up around the edges. It's funny how when you tidy a part of the garden, the part next to it looks more scruffy than before. That's the charm of gardening, I suppose. It's April already and I haven't sown anything, so I've set myself a challenge - sow one packet of seeds every night this week.

White stuff

Snow arrived yesterday morning, and it has wrapped us in a blanket of white. It's beautiful, but deadly for most of the plants I imagine. Even the greenhouse perlagoniums look distinctly unhappy. I have never encountered a single snowfall this deep in this part of the world. It's at an over-the-top-of-your-wellies level in some places.

Those pesky cats

Brrr, what a cold snap. Relieved those bulbs are planted and the perlargoniums are now safely inside the greenhouse. Still, I got out there today and cleared up dead leaves and cat turds. Why don't cat turds decompose? What is it they put in Kit-e-Kat these days? I snipped more holly sprigs from some bushes on nearby common land that doesn't appear to belong to anybody (sorry if it's you) and put them down in the vain hope that I will find fewer fresh turds next week-end. My more pleasant discovery was a single pink rose, clinging on despite the frost.

Thing 20 - Thinkin' Free

Crikey. ThinkFree Office is really a posher (and therefore slower) remake of Google Docs. I like the look of this environment, with its fluffy white clouds in the background. Its compatability with existing Word files is neat, too. Now all I need is for it to work at the pace to which I have become accustomed.. i.e. without having to wait for 10 minutes. I'm still not all that keen to entrust confidential information to a cloud-friendly site, either. But this is (probably) the office of the future. Enjoy this rainbow of irises, discovered a few days ago. Yes, they are all irises.