Lovely flowers, cold weather

Now spring is really going, there are new flowers out daily it seems.  Suddenly all of my fruit trees and shrubs are in bloom or, in the case of the almond, already finished.  And my eclectic collection of ornamentals are also having a good show too, including the flowering currant, flowering quince and gorse, pictured.  I've got bulbs flowering, herbaceous perennials, shrubs, trees, even a vine.  What a lovely time of year.

Pinks and yellows and greens, March 2024

But it's still not consistently warm--yesterday for instance we didn't make it to 10C, which in my book is pretty cold for spring.  Not a bad temp for winter mind you, but not the kind of weather for encouraging my little vegetable seedlings to grow.

We call it the burning bush, March 2024

Over the weekend we had one cold day and one warm day, so I did what I could while I could;  I transplanted some kohl rabi seedlings from pots to ground in the kitchen garden and extended the insect mesh to protect them from pigeons and ducks (the first several rows have the other end of the mesh, put in place last week).  I also planted out a few more late-emerging broad beans at the allotment, and used the newly emptied trays and pots to start some more snap pea seeds;  the first tray of these from about two weeks ago are now just sprouting up.  I also sowed a few more packets of older seed into large pots en masse, hoping at least some will sprout;  these I will prick out individually.  As I did with a pot of lettuce seedlings at the weekend.  

And as a fun aside, we are down to five squashes from 2023's harvest of 21.  Plus about a 2 pound wedge from the sixth squash still in the fridge, hoping to finish within the next day.  Those squashes take a lot of eating, but to have them hanging out in the living room for six months and still be just as good as when we picked them really is something.