Here’s a small snapshot of my corner of the world this week. The recent sunny weather has got all the tulips galloping at a hundred miles an hour, regardless of me wanting to rein them in for May weddings! Everything is busting out all over, and both the Tuckshop Garden and the plot have filled out into a sea of fresh, bright green foliage in the last few weeks, transforming once again from winter mud baths into proper gardens with proper flowers. In the depths of winter it feels like an impossibility that they will ever billow with growth again.
The onrush of tulips heralds the new growing season – and its funny to think how April seasonality can vary so wildly from year to year. I remember in my first year of business I was tearing my hair out as the garden sat under a foot of snow the week before my first ever farmers’ market. This year, I’m welcoming the cold days as I’m desperate to slow the garden down a bit to keep some late tulips in reserve for next month’s weddings – I think that might be a vain hope as they are really hurtling along. (The silver lining is that it is excellent news for next week’s flower arranging workshop participants – they’ll have a rainbow of tulips to get their hands on!)
I’m also sowing seeds as fast as the greenhouse can make space for them – lots of lovely annuals like cornflowers, scabious, cosmos daisies, sunflowers, corncockle, love-in-a-mist and godetia can all be sown now for abundant cut and come again crops from early summer onwards. I sow mine in pots to get them going before planting them out – giving them the best possible chance to get established before the surrounding wildlife sets to work on them. Be prepared to resow as, for everything that survives, there are always failures to match.
I seem to have fox setting up camp under my shed at the plot, so am half expecting to see fox cubs emerging into my flower beds in the next few months. Not quite sure how I feel about that…. but they might make good food for my instagram feed!