Progress report.

I keep looking at the garden and wondering when things will really turn towards the growing season. The tulips and alliums are slowly emerging, buds are on the spirea and the lungworts bravely having a go at flowering and the ground elder is coming back to say hello.

Here and there, a few patches of self-sown seeds (weeds?) are germinating, so even though it feels subzero, I guess things must be warming up slightly.  Not so much that my hesitant hellebores have dared to open the buds which they've been holding for a month, however.

Tomorrow is farmer's market day, but thankfully not for me.  I still catch my breath in mild panic at the thought of filling a stall in April, especially looking at the low temperatures predicted for the next few weeks in long range forecasts. Will anything ever grow????

Keep trying to come up with resourceful ideas, and have made some dogwood wreaths with multi-coloured stems. Like my china finds, I fall in love with them and find myself reluctant to part with these little beauties and covet them for my own. Will have to train myself out of such tendencies pretty sharpish!!

On a bright (very bright) note, this week saw me organise market stall insurance, and take delivery of some packaging materials - small paper carriers in eye-pokey pink and equally vibrant tissue papers.  It is quite sad how excited I got about their arrival. Makes me feel like a kid playing at shop.   I've also ordered business cards and t-shirts so things feel like they are actually going somewhere now.

Spent this morning hiding in the greenhouse potting up my MASSIVE dahlia tubers (let's hope this bodes well for floriferousness - they are about twice the size of the tubers I've previously bought from garden centres). Seed sowing included cerinthe (to replace the lot which the cats knocked flying last week in their sneak greenhouse raid), heartsease violas and more stocks.  The stocks I sowed in the cold greenhouse are looking much more purposeful than the ones sown in heat, indoors, so will stick to a cold regime for those in future.  For the allotment, also potted up some broad bean seeds, but am running out of space so the rest will have to get sown direct into the soil next month with prayers for reasonable, seasonable weather.

I think I will feel much better about everything when the trees come into leaf and things really start to take off. Until that magical 'boing' moment, things feel like they are never going to to turn. Hurry up spring, I've got plants to plant.