Six on Saturday 24-03-2018

You could almost be forgiven for thinking it was spring these last few days. Temperatures just about in the double figures, sun shining, that kind of thing. I keep hearing rumours of winter returning over Easter. I hope that is some kind of dastardly online influence campaign at the behest of the Russian glove industry and not a geniune meterological prediction. I am SO done with winter. Time for a confident Spring Six on Saturday then. Six things, in the garden, on a Saturday. Could be anything – a flower, a plan, a harvest, a failure, a tool, anything at all. Easy! Why not join in?

Here are my Six for this week.

1 – Magnolia stellata. Talking of Spring, here is one of the seasonal harbingers in my garden. It was 4 feet high when we bought the house 17 years ago, now it is maybe 5 feet high, so pretty slow growing. It flowers profusely through April and smells pretty good too. This is the first bud to start opening.

2 – Clematis buds. I love a clematis. I have about 20 dotted about the garden. A few are established but most were planted as small plants last winter. I was concerned I might have lost a few but on closer inspection, all either have new growth emerging from stems above ground, or coming from the roots below ground. I am hoping all the newer ones will put on some more substantial growth this year and the flowers to go with it of course.

3 – Honesty. Grown from seed last year, there are a few of these around the garden. They should flower this year, purple I think, then come the seed pods for which they are better known. The foliage is underwhelming.

4 – Unknown weed. Well, I think it’s a weed. I guess if I say it’s a weed it’s a weed on the basis that it’s growing where I don’t want it. It comes back every year, no matter how hard I try to get rid of it. Spreads too. Grrr.

5 – Tulip flower bud. For a grown man in my mid-40s, I am very over-excited by the prospect of tulip flowers. This particular bud is from one of about 300 tulip bulbs planted in November last year. Very much looking forward to some spring colour.

6 – Cardboard boxes. I normally have an empty compost bay into which I periodically turn the active heap. I’ve decided this is a waste of composting volume so I have resolved to fill this bay too. I have been accumulating materials to build a hot heap. I already have some spent hops from my local brewery, old newspapers, and this is part of my cardboard stash, a good ‘brown’ ingredient for the heap. On Sunday I will be collecting a load of fresh horse manure. When I have all the ingredients I will be layering them up to fill the spare bay. The fresh manure should be a good activator, ensuring a nice high temperature, perhaps 60°C, enough to accelerate the composting process and to kill any weed seeds the horses have been inconsiderate enough to eat.

Those are my Six for this week, what are yours? If you’d like to join in, couldn’t be easier. Just publish your Six post, then add a comment to my post here with a link to your post so everyone else can see it. If you also add a link back to this blog in your post, that would be great. For more details you can read the brief participant guide.

Have a super weekend, don’t forget to check back in as more links are added over the course of the day.

I’ll be back next week with another Six on Saturday.