Come on Spring!!!

 I've been holding out for Spring since...well, a long time! And Spring seems slow in coming this year. Last year at this time, we were in the full throes of the first pandemic lockdown. The weather was glorious and the garden was in full bloom. This year - not so much. Here we are at the end of April and I have had to haul out a sheet of garden mesh to protect my newly planted seedlings against yet another late frost. It's sunny out, but the North wind is up, the nights are nippy and the blackthorn is still the dominant bloom. 

All quite frustrating given that I am raring to go, fired up by all those months of wistful, waiting lockdown. (And I suspect that there are many others like me as we emerge from lockdown number three). Admittedly, in my eagerness, I probably started the season too early. If the seed packet said `sow March to April' I sowed in early March. Which means that I now have lots of seedlings that need to get into the ground - hence the enviro-mesh and frustration. I have never been very good at patience.

On the experimental side, I have given up the quest to grow sweet potatoes and have re-purposed two rubble-tubs into potato planters instead. Lots of gardeners don't bother with potatoes as they are cheap to buy, but a potato straight out the garden is a very tasty thing indeed. I have tried to grow them on and off since I have had my veggie patch. The rubble-tubs in question are recycled laundry tubs whose handles broke. Fortunately, potato planters have no need of handles and so, with a couple of holes drilled in them - voila! So far, so good: the potatoes are sprouting and the tubs are holding up. All the literature promises loads of lovely potatoes in an easy-to-harvest format. Hmmm - I will keep you posted.

While the garden is taking its time to burst into life, the local fauna are having a field day. We appear to have a ratty resident under our decking once again. The dog told us it was there long before we saw it, but I know it to be a rat, because I opened the curtains one early morning, so see it sitting out in full view. To be fair, it is quite a good-looking rat and  I do have a soft-spot for rodents, but we are not so naïve as to think that it can set up home. Getting it to move on has, however, become a dilemma. When we had a rat a couple of years ago, we set traps, but kept catching mice (we are in the countryside). Now we have a humane trap, but despite baiting it every night and finding the bait gone every morning, Ratty has eluded us and our only catch has been a traumatised blackbird. Many years ago, when we lived in Messina, South Africa, the standard way of discouraging unwanted visitors (from rats to scorpions) was to wash down the area with Jeyes Fluid. Presumably the potent smell is too much for them. So I have a tin of Jeyes fluid which will be the next experiment in getting the rat to move.

And the rat has not been the only visitor. The husband arrived home one afternoon to report that he had had to drive around a dove on the driveway. Further inspection found it to be a juvenile ring neck that seemed to have become too cold. It was unresponsive, but alive, so we took it inside and let it overnight in a box by the radiator. The next morning I let it out and was pleased to see a parent bird appear almost immediately. The youngster, with a lot on encouragement from its parent, flapped onto the hedge and away across the neighbours garden.

Then there was the juvenile blackbird that suddenly appeared at the sliding doors. Confused, it kept flapping into the glass. It had to be caught (a case of walking up to it and enclosing it in my hands) and turned around so that it could fly away, chirping loudly at the indignation.

 And then there was the bat. I was raking the garden early last week when I heard a high-pitched screaming. There, quite disguised against the soil, was a little bat, shrieking away. I was convinced that I had raked it although there was no sign of injury. I put it in a box and called the Essex Bat Group who have been absolutely fantastic. The bat is a pipistrelle and after collecting it, bat rescuer, Steve found that it was covered in glue. Apparently the glue from fly papers sticks to these little bats and can ground them, making them easy prey to cats. Where I thought the bat had lost an ear, it turned out that his ear was glued down, as well as one eye being completely covered in glue. Happily, my little bat turned out to be quite determined to live and was eating almost as soon as the glue was removed. He was brought back by Steve and his partner at the end of the week and released, well-recovered - a magical micro-second of a tiny bat against the full moon. I only hope that he is successful at avoiding any other glue!

And finally, over the weekend morning, an amazing bloom of spiders happened in my green house. I was astonished to see a hammock of tiny little yellow spiderlings spun between an old container and a seedling where I hadn't noticed a web before. They appear to be garden spiders and mass hatchings are common at this time of year, but I have never seen one before. The little spiders seem to have spent much of their time sleeping, but blowing on the hammock results in much movement - like skittering gold dust. Now, a couple of days in, the hammock is emptying out - presumably as the little spiders go off to find their own areas of the garden to populate. They were hard to capture in a picture - they look like little grains of dirt on the left.

So maybe Spring is here after all - and hopefully the warmth and great growing are just around the corner!