New Camellia and mole hills

Finally the cold weather has relented and it suddenly feels like summer might be about to happen. It’s the time of year when I personally get constantly challenged over where I have just come back from holiday. Answer: nowhere. I have naturally tanning skin and spend a lot of my time outdoors in the garden or shouting at school children in PE lessons. Others have suggested I might have some sort of Mediterranean genealogical predecessors.  Who knows.

It is also the time of year when stuff really starts to happen, with the perennials in the border suddenly getting going (I think they might have been growing for a while – I just did not notice the Echinacea as the rabbits kept grazing them back to the bare earth. I little chicken wire around them has worked wonders).

I’ve planted a camellia that the OM randomly produced from some mail order or other and I’ve had to earth up the potatoes as well.  In the background of the camellia picture you can see the moles are enjoying the sun as well…

But many plants are taking some time to get over the cold weather. The sweet peas might have been terminally affected by the frosts and the extreme temperature range in the greenhouse meant the tomatoes looked as if they had blight. They have survived but are struggling to regain their good looks and start growing properly.  And the melons, to coin some schoolboy humour, have gone from up and coming 34B’s to something akin to sagging, flaccid aged A cups.  No amount of surgery is going to help them, I suspect.