Waiting for the Spring

After a lovely chat with mum and dad (which included the delivery of two beehive water butts), I decided to decamp to the garden.

Mirinda’s plan (one of them, anyway) is to have a succession of bulbs popping up in front of my office come springtime. To this end, part of our garden centre purchases on Saturday were two big bags of bulbs and some top soil.

Something that I only realised when I started digging the bed was how many roots a big old willow tree can leave behind. I’d almost forgotten its existence. I was sorely reminded today as root after root caught on my spade or fork and I’d spend an age extracting it. I’m pretty sure I had enough to make another tree.

I was soon sweating like the proverbial. The fleece went very quickly. The very light drizzle that remained all day, was very welcome.

In between times (or ‘short breaks’ as I call them) I would pop into the office and make some urgent amendment to the U3A website. I think I really put the cat among the pigeons yesterday. The Chairman has gone mad with suggestions and page amendments and my phone was alerting me to his emails every two minutes. Not that I’m complaining at all. I love it.

Finally I’d cleared away the grass and an awful lot of root material and was ready to site the bulbs. As I said, we bought two bags. One lot of daffodils and another of tulips. The daffs, naturally, will be yellow (they are called Cornish Gold and looked gorgeous in the Garden Centre) and, we hope, something like this:

These are not ours! I ‘borrowed’ the image from a website.

The tulips, on the other hand, were a mixed bunch. All sorts of colours. So, that’ll be a bit of a surprise then.

And there were heaps of them. I worked through till 5:30, my laptop playing all manner of music on shuffle to keep me amused and entertained. And this is how it looked at the end of play.

The long wait begins…

What looks like rubbish on the bed is actually a bit of leftover sand (to help with drainage beneath the bulbs…apparently) and a few bits of bulb skin. It will go soon enough.