Except to say – the swallows are back!    The blogosphere has been awash with reports of swallow sightings for weeks, and we were beginning to think the family who we’ve become accustomed to sharing our summer garden with had had a better offer, but at the weekend they finally returned.  Hovering at the back door, investigating whether our back hall would be a good nesting site, dive bombing the cat as she crosses the garden, and no doubt eventually, as usual, deciding to nest under the lych gate.

Not the variety or colour we ordered, but stunning nonetheless!

And the cuckoo is back too!   Unusually, our tardy swallows were beaten back here this year by the cuckoo, who’s been joining in the dawn chorus for a week now.

Spring has sprung!

As mad May approaches, activity on the nursery is ramping up, and threatening to move from “frantic” to “maybe we can spend less time eating or sleeping…” The sun is shining, the grass is growing (dammit) and the countryside is developing the spectacular lime green glow that comes with the youthful vigour of newly unfurled foliage.

All’s well with the world!   Enjoy!   (And don’t the tulips look lovely?).

Many years ago, when our children were pre-school, and CBBC ,cbeebies, the cartoon channel and digital television were just TV mogul’s pipe dreams, we used to resort to recording what meagre offerings terrestial TV sent our way, and the kids would watch stuff again (and again) when there was nothing on live.   Amongst other things, this accounts for our ability, even now, to recite most of the dialogue from (the original, Gene Wilder version of) Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory….

One of the more obscure delights to emerge from the VHS machine at this time was a 1936 MGM Happy Harmonies cartoon which told of a band of subterranean elves whose job it was to add the colours of spring to the world each year, and how they fought an epic (and somewhat chaotic) battle with resurgent winter before spring was finally sprung.

In our family folklore, this has always been referred to as “The Colours of the World” although having just searched it out on YouTube (is there anything you can’t find on YouTube?) we were surprised to see it’s actually called “To Spring”.   And every year, when spring falters and our eccentric climate stumbles back into winter, the cry goes up “It’s like the colours of the world!”.

That cry is starting to sound a little worn right now, as spring 2010 splutters and falters and….well, lets just hope things are about to improve.   Easter weekend lived up to it’s reputation for meteorlogical variability, but the forecast for later this week is looking promising, and the long term forecast for April looks typical, if not actually great.   Most things on the nursery and in the garden have got buds just itching to burst, so surely any day now we’re going to see a splendid spring, aren’t we?

And if you have 9 minutes 39 seconds to spare….

If you’ve visited The Lost Gardens of Heligan you’ll probably remember the little ledge in the bothy near the pineapple pits where the garden boy used to sleep.   It was his job to stoke the fire that kept the pineapple pit warm through the night, and he slept on the little stone shelf so that he was nearby when the fire needed attention.

It was tough in horticulture in those days!

The plight of that bothy boy often comes to mind when we find ourselves facing adverse working conditions;  not because anything we have to face comes near the conditions faced by victorian gardeners, rather as a consolation that whatever happens, we’re so much better off than they were.

Brrrr

And so today we found ourselves contemplating the lot of that poor garden boy once again.  We decided to water some of the plants in one of the tunnels, and found ourselves smashing through a layer of ice to get to the water in the butt.

At midday, second week of March.   The weather continues frustratingly victorian!

Cold and dispiriting for us, very confusing for the plants.   Days are lengthening, and day time light levels have been good.  The plants want to grow – but temperatures in low single figures by day, and well below zero at night leave them thinking a bit longer in hibernation is in order.

It’s going to be one of those years where a late start is followed by explosive growth when the weather finally warms up.

Now that our first compost delivery has arrived?

That'll fill a few hanging baskets.....

No hanging about for the first cuckoo around here – once the first compost delivery of the season arrives, and the Barlow Nurseries Great Wall of Compost has been reinstated, it’s Spring, and that’s that.

The weather still has completely different ideas of course, and with sleet and snow featuring large in the forthcoming weekend’s forecast, there’s still little chance of much gardening getting done (or compost being sold!).

But with compost piled high, we know the great british climate will come good when it’s ready, and when it does, we’re ready for it!

Damn cold.   And no sign of it warming up much either.

Cold, but not coldest!

So absolutely no garden or nursery work happening.    Not a jot.  Zilch.  Bugger all.   Which is all a bit strange really;  we don’t expect to do much during the winter months – we work 7 days a week from spring to autumn, so the winter is our “weekend” – but it’s very unusual indeed to have done nothing at all for as long as we’ve had to this winter.

And bizarrely, it hasn’t been that cold.   Well, okay, it has been absurdly cold, but we’re used to living in the coldest place in England, and during this cold snap the weather seems to have been happening elsewhere, and this part of Shropshire has been cossetted in its own little microclimate.

Cheshire, just a little north of here, and Oxford – that’s the soft south surely – both recorded temperatures around minus 17 centigrade last week, and all we could muster was a paltry minus 14!   And very little snow – less than a couple of inches, certainly substantially less than most parts of the country if the news media are to be believed.

Is that Doctor Zhivago over there?

So the world is on hold until the weather loosens its grip;  we can’t even manage the bonfire we’d been looking forward to following our tree felling – we did try, but the wood is just too wet and cold, so even that avenue of outdoor fun has been closed off to us!

It still looks rather attractive over there though, don’t you think?   Taking the trees down has allowed a lot more wonderful winter sunlight into the garden, and that must augur well for the fruit and veg we’re hoping to grow there later in the year.

And so for the moment, we’ll make the best of it.   The countryside looks wonderful, and if the weather men are to be believed this is a once in 30 years experience, so it’s one to savour rather than whinge about!

We were real townies when we moved here.   Nothing wrong with that of course;  if you’ve lived in towns all your life, there’s nothing else to be, but becoming country folk was not the smooth and seamless transition we’d planned – there were real surprises lurking in the rural idyll.

The most striking was probably the dark.   When you live in an urban area you’re never far from electric light.   Road safety engineers’ enthusiasm for flood lighting as much of the world as they can means that even if your bit of suburbia is only modestly illuminated, there will still be light pollution spilling in from somewhere nearby.   Even on the darkest nights there’ll be light enough to see by.

We’re not that far from civilisation here of course, and we can see the eerie orange glows of the Telford and Stafford conurbations on the horizon, but we are several miles from any significant lighting.   And on a cloudy winter night, you can’t see a thing.   Nothing.   Not even your hand in front of your face.   That’s country dark that is.   And until you get used to it, it’ll spook you.

Probably the second surprise was the wildlife.   We were expecting wildlife of course, but weren’t really prepared for the sheer volume, or its enthusiasm for sharing the house with us.    The scene was set on our first day when Nick rashly turned on the flourescent light in the garage at dusk, with the door open, and was promptly engulfed by a cloud of  the largest flying insects in Shropshire.    A Kamikaze dung beetle, a squadron of moths the size of small cars, and several thousand of their friends crowded in, while Nick hastily flicked off the light, and beat his way out.

And then there were the rodents.    You get rodents in suburbia of course, but we must have led a charmed life because we’d never had a problem with them.   The rat bait we found in the loft, and under the floor boards, suggested we weren’t going to be leading the same charmed life here.    You soon get desensitized to it of course; after the first few dozen dead mice you stop squirming.  And you learn fast.   Mostly you learn that you need help, and if you can find someone that thinks catching mice is about the best fun in the world, so much the better. So we got a cat.   Cats really are the most impressive predators, and the cheapest and most enthusiastic employees you’ll ever recruit.

That's cold that is

But probably the oddest lesson of country life was the weather.   For the first several years that we lived here we watched the weather forecasts to check the overnight temperatures, and were consistently surprised that it was always colder here than the weather man had said it would be.   We started thinking we must be in some sort of weird microclimate – Newport, the coldest place in England, is just 4 miles away after all – but the weather man knew that, so why didn’t he take that into consideration in his forecasts?

The answer, which we were embarrassingly slow to catch on to, is that it is colder here than where most people live.   The weather forecasts are tailored for the majority of the population, who live in towns and cities, and we’re in the country!   Another country dweller must have complained to the Met Office, because their forecasters now make a special point of saying “these are temperatures for towns and cities, it’ll be several degrees cooler in rural areas”.

And so it is.  Our picture (all this preamble just to show you a picture of a thermometer!) shows last night’s low hovering around -11 degrees centigrade (the forecast was minus 6!).   And yes, those numbers have been written on by hand – it’s an old thermometer, and the print wasn’t as weather proof as it might have been, so we’ve had to give it a helping hand!

Next week’s weather is forecast to be equally cold, and the odds of a white Christmas have shortened considerably in the last few days, so it’s looking like it’s going to be a cold ‘un.   Time to dig out the winter woolies, and make the best of the wonderful variability of the Great British weather (whilst avoiding all thought of the balmy conditions our suburban friends might be enjoying).