Looking ahead and a bit of nostalgia

Is it too late to say Happy New Year? Well I’m saying it anyway – Happy New Year to you! I hope you had a good time over Christmas. My presents didn’t include a bird box camera, despite the heavy hint, but it’s probably just as well because there are a number of blue tits checking out the box already. I fear if I tamper with it now, I might put them off. There’s always my birthday in July, which would give plenty of time to get a camera installed before 2025. My sister, who works in a school, took the old nest to the children’s Wildlife Club last week – apparently it’s still doing the rounds at the school. The children have been fascinated by how small the eggs are and wanted to know what’s inside them and how big the bird box hole is. I wasn’t brave enough to crack any of the eggs open, but I was able to let them know the hole has a diameter of about 3 cm. So, I didn’t get a bird box camera for Christmas, but GR did give me a very handsome bug hotel, which will be declared open once our new fence is installed in March.

Last week I went to a talk on growing winter salads. Sounds riveting doesn’t it, but actually it was really inspiring. It was delivered by Tony Chalcraft & Jane Thurlow from The Nursery, Acomb, York. They grow mainly fruit and veg and they’re doing some open days in July. As well as providing great advice on what to grow and when, including some more unusual salad varieties, they also highlighted the carbon footprint involved in the production of items like supermarket mixed salad bags. It’s significant when you take into account what goes into the growing stage (which almost certainly includes spraying with pesticides), packaging, transportation across the globe and potential for waste. GR is really into his salads so I’m resolved to improve on my spring and summer salad and veg growing performance this year and extend my efforts into the winter. I now know there are salads I can grow successfully under cover of my unheated plastic greenhouses, right into the New Year. I’ll have to be organised to get the seedlings started over the autumn and not miss the boat like I did with my poinsettia.

I’ve been in a clearing-out frenzy since Christmas. This has included attacking my vast collection of seed packets. Now I’m pretty relaxed about ‘best before’ dates where food is concerned (depending on what it is of course), but some of my opened seed packets were marked sow before 2020, which might be pushing it a bit. Some of the packets were empty – I suspect I kept them because I thought it would remind me to buy more. Anyway I’m super organised now, with the remaining (still numerous) packets stored in envelopes marked up with the months to be sown and whether that should be indoors or outdoors. Do you think I need to get out more?!

Another area I’ve attacked, non garden related really, has been several boxes marked up ‘Slides & Cines‘. These we inherited from GR’s dad, who was a keen amateur photographer. They’ve been on a top shelf in our unheated garage for over 10 years and I very much expected they would have disintegrated. But no – although some are quite dusty, they look pretty good when fed through an old slide viewer. Over the past fortnight I have viewed thousands, most of which were views, but there are some good ones of GR, right from babyhood, through to his awkward teenage years and beyond. Now GR insists he has absolutely no interest in gardening – his mum clearly tried to encourage him to develop green fingers, but failed miserably. I’ll leave you with this slide I scanned – it’s GR aged 3, so it’s survived since 1962!