Please can it be Spring now? I realise that we don't have the massive snows of North America, but man, I am tired of the cold, tired of bundling children up in actual clothes and tired of the dark. But mostly, I am just desperate to start the garden.
We have spent most of the winter working on structural improvements to the walled kitchen garden. We still have so so much work to do. The drainage continues to be a disaster of pond-like proportions. The ducks love it, but we keep loosing children to knee deep mud. We are laying drainage pipe this weekend, but I have a suspicion its just going to move the problem to the road if at all.
We have also worked on improving the very tired soil. We tried two different tactics on the large beds - digging in vs lasagne gardening. In tests, lasagne killed it, creating loamy black dirt with zero effort.
But with the end of this year's structural work in sight, I just want to get on and start growing. This year at the recommendation of my friend, we have gone with Real Seeds who stock mostly heritage and non-commercial seeds. I poured over the details and picked basically every type of veg that could be grown in Siberia, Ukraine and anything else that could be classed as Baltic (in both the geographical and Scots use of the word). Kevin scoffed at my buying 8 different kinds of tomatoes, but I can feel it in my gut that this is the year I will get tomatoes off my own vines.
We also went with heritage variety potatoes, with our maincrop being Highland Burgundy Red. We are in the process of building a few potato bins as in my mind there are few things than a homegrown potato (other than a homegrown tomato).
For now though, I have to wait. Its still just a shade too early to start anything and with deadlines mounting, I will have to be content with just crocheting by the fire.
Oh the hardship. ;)