It seems to have taken longer than ever for the blossom to come, but it has eventually happened. I think we probably missed some of it because the foul weather at times has driven us back indoors! Hopefully by the time you read this we will be enjoying a blissfully warm and pleasant summer month. So, on the plus side late blossom has missed the frosts and we should get a bumper fruit crop. We more or less missed out altogether last year when the early start to the year petered out leaving us feeling that we had been robbed! Our summer had been stolen. This year will be different; already the barbecue has been cleaned and used a couple of times, and I am really keen to make the garden easier to maintain so that we can have more time enjoying it and spend less time working on it!

The garden is full of blossom! But we are, by all accounts, three weeks behind the natural season. The long winter has eaten into our precious spring! It is a bit of a shaker to think that the longest day is only a matter of 6 weeks away and that we are still looking at relatively low soil temperatures.

I am writing this without knowing exactly what the weather will be like when you read so please forgive me if nothing matches up with reality, but that’s the way it goes. I have a day in the garden today and there is very little growing yet. The soil is more or less ready to sow and I ‘m dodging in and out between some really heavy rain showers which is not unusual for this time of year. All in all nature which catch up and bring everything into line at some point; day length is absolutely fixed and there’s no way of fooling the earth in its orbit to get extra days of summer.

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