Spring Is Sprung

  

                                  

Aww…bless! The Kindly Smallholders’ lambs are gambolling round the field and the plastic bottle crop is growing nicely. Not so sure about the plants inside them, though. The first row of scabious I planted out look happy enough, but I’m not sure if they’re actually growing. I keep peering into the tops of the bottles and trying to judge if they’re getting bigger, but I can’t really tell. One minute I get a panic that it’s the end of March already and things should be romping away (Sarah “I’m Not Worthy” Raven is no doubt picking armfuls by now), but then I think how half the country is covered in snow and how, this time last year, all I had were a few seedlings in a greenhouse, and I think it’s all going swimmingly. Then the sun goes behind a cloud again and my confidence goes with it… 

I put a load of cornflower plants out yesterday. I’m growing the traditional blue but also ‘Black Ball’, which are a lovely dark crimson, if somewhat weedy of stem. They’re good for blousy, cottagey bunches (they make a fabulous dark foil for orange eschscholzia and lime green euphorbia) although not so good if you’re doing a hand-tied bunch where you want the arrangement to stand up on its own. The plants were sown in the autumn and have been looking a bit sad and mildewy in the cold frame, which is why I decided to plant them out.  They’re too big for the plastic bottles but they need some protection from the slugs so I’ve made these collars of plastic to go round the stems. They looked really unhappy when I left, but it’s been rain, sun, rain, sun all day today so hopefully they will have perked up.

I’ve also booked myself in to a couple of farmers’ markets for the last week of May. (Eek!) The way things are at the moment, I can’t imagine having any flowers by then at all, let alone enough to sell. Keep looking at pictures of other flower stalls and the stallholders can hardly see out for all the dozens of buckets of perfect specimens. My stomach plummets with nerves when I think about having promised to do something I won’t be able to come good on, but then I look at the pictures of the bunches I cobbled together out of practically nothing last June and all the space I have to plant in, and it seems I’ll have more flowers than I could ever know what to do with.  Hate not knowing how things will work out. If we could just have a couple of weeks of sunshine, everything would really get going and then I think I could relax. Maybe.