When I blithely added the title “what’s going on in the garden this spring?” to my content calendar back along, I was envisioning a nice sunny spring where I spent entire weekends outside, lying on a blanket, with a book next to me and a notebook I hadn’t actually touched. I envisioned coaxing vegetables into gorgeous verdant life with my magic voice and birds landing on my outstretched fingers. In short, I envisioned myself somewhere between an Earth goddess and a Disney princess at the stage of her life where she hasn’t met the prince yet.
The reality has not been like that.
By and large, May has been damp and breezy, often windy and frequently pouring with violent rain. I’d hoped my entire garden would be flourishing in the greenhouse by now and ready and eager to live outside in the open air. But the nights are still cold and this year’s peppers, planted two months earlier than last year’s, are not as big as they should be and probably not even as big as they were this time last year. So much for getting two months ahead.
They live inside but by the back door where they’re probably not as warm or sun kissed as they would be on the dining room window. But there isn’t room for them there. Five of my twelve tomato plants are doing ok but they should be getting on for two feet tall by now, not struggling for six inches. Every weekend I say that it’s time they got moved up into their junior pots but every weekend it’s cold and wet and I leave them in their nursery pots for yet another week.
The other problem in the greenhouse, apart from that my dad and sister have filled it up as if it’s their greenhouse – good thing it’s too cold to move the peppers out and that everyone else is too small for their mid-size pots yet – is the infestation of snails. I never had a single snail in my vegetables last year. Now there are actual teeth marks in my radishes and everything has a delicate lace pattern in its leaves. What kind of gymnasts are snails, to reach the third and fourth shelf of a plastic greenhouse?
If you follow me on Instagram, you might see semi-regular veg updates on my stories. The tarragon was doing great until this weekend when it’s gone limp and I’ve realised only one side is getting much sunshine. I didn’t expect much from the raspberries. Three of them are still alive but apart from that, I was absolutely right – I’m not getting much from them. The radishes were meant to be edible within five weeks; at nine weeks we harvested and ate eight of them. A week later there were three more but the rest are just little red dots. Anything big enough to eat is indeed being eaten but it’s by a plague of snails that didn’t come near the garden last year.
The carrots, leeks, red onions and spring onions are finally looking like more than green wisps but they were put out in the cold too early, despite what it said on the packet and won’t be ready to taste for months. The best I can hope for with the carrots is baby carrots – I don’t have space to plant them in nice rows so they’re in a round plastic bag called a patio planter. It means they’re hopelessly overcrowded. I should pull 90% of them up to give the rest a chance but then I’ll end up with about six carrots so I’m going to leave them as they are.
The leeks started off in two window troughs but then my sister found raised planters at Lidl and so I transplanted them and they’re looking a little better than they were when they were on the floor.
At least the basil’s doing ok. I chopped off the top to make it thick and bushy and I’m drying the bits I cut off. The rest is still leggy but at least it’s enthusiastic.
To the wildlife.
The hedgehogs emerged from hibernation back in… February? March? Long enough ago that it seems to be mating season. I don’t think we’re getting the aggression we did last year – either that or the appeal of watching a robot read r/EntitledPeople on YouTube is greater than the appeal of watching every minute of hedgehog activity these days. That’s my dad, by the way. He religiously puts out the hedgehog food and brings in the camera every day but last year it used to occupy hours every day. Now it seems to be almost a cursory glance to make sure hedgehogs appear in most of the three-minute clips (or as he persistently tries to call them, “frames”) and then copying everything to the hedgehog drive – yes, he has two hard drives devoted entirely to the hedgehog camera – before returning to YouTube. Mustn’t subscribe to the people he watches for 10+ hours a day, though. They might earn money from it.
As to what’s actually appear on the camera – well, we’ve had plenty of hedgehog-shoving. One of them will charge while the other curls up and allows itself to be pushed around. The moment the aggressor scurries off, its victim uncurls and returns to the food as if nothing happened. We had one that screeched the other day. A smaller one trying to be tough in front of a big one, circling and trying to keep back while snorting and screeching incessantly while the big one utterly ignored it. I never knew hedgehogs make a noise. You’ll want the sound on for this.
The food is special hedgehog biscuit. We were putting out sunflower hearts as well but then our local wildlife trust did a feature on hedgehogs in their monthly magazine and it turns out sunflower hearts are too high in phosphorous and it ends up damaging their calcium levels, which is obviously bad for them. Rather than worry about moderation, we’ve just removed them from the hedgehog buffet and left the biscuit. If you’re interested, this is the one that’s currently sitting by the back door. They also have a dog bowl of water because hedgehogging is thirsty work and how much biscuit can you eat without something to wash it down?
As for the birds, we’ve had a very round blackbird fledgling caught on the hedgehog camera. For a couple of mornings its parents fed or hedgehog food and then it figured out how to shovel it into its gaping beak all by itself. Last year we had juvenile goldfinches and baby wood pigeons but no sightings this year. Plenty of sparrows, adult wood pigeons, doves, crows, rooks, even a magpie and of course the robin. It has a particular branch in the tree over the back where it can keep an eye on proceedings.
I think I saw a fledgling starling in the garden this morning – it may have been an adult all fluffed up but it had the same kind of round cluelessness as the baby blackbird. The birds, by the way, are not being cooperative with being photographed. It was ok last year when I could lie out there in the big puffy reclining chair until they forgot about me and came down to the table or to peck in the grass but they don’t like a vertical human being around. I did manage to catch this pigeon in the bird bath from inside the house, though.
There are a few things from plague life that I’d like to keep, and an interest in vegetables and birds and the garden is one of them. When I buy my own place, it realistically won’t have a garden – I reckon I can afford working kitchen or garden but not both – but I’d definitely look into allotments, just for the sake of having that green space and my vegetables.