It's May it MUST be Spring!

Walled garden. Stromness on the horizon

Ha!  Well sort of.  The sun is warm, if you can find a sheltered spot. But the weather is what can only be described as "changeable"! And temperatures are still a bit on the low side even for Orkney. Although the temperature got up to 10 degress C today. Double digits. Wow! Spring IS here.

So - of course it's time to get into the garden.  The gardening season is short in Orkney, usually May through to October IF you are lucky.  It takes till about now for the earth to warm up, but from now on things put on an amazing growth spurt.  You can HEAR plants growing!

So this weekend I cut the grass around the house and in the walled garden, and started thinking of planting "stuff".  So far I planted broad beans and peas.  Everything has to be protected from pecky hens till it has grown a little sturdier.  Hence all the green netting.  I also have a chicken fence to put up to keep them OUT so we'll see how that goes.

I do love being in the garden with the hens though. They love rootling around as I dig.  I'm creating a new bed in the walled garden.  Bit ambitious as I can't really cope with all the borders as it is. Though I do have help from neighbour, S, who does lots of the hard graft for me. Anyway the girls were having a good rummage in the earth where I had turned back the black plastic which was put down last winter to kill off the grass.  So far I've just planted some crocosmia "Lucifer" in this bed. But there are some plants to be moved from another border where things have got a little crowded, and some new ones to introduce too.

Um, yes that picture is a little off the horizontal!  But it's tricky trying to photograph hens while holding the camera with gardening gloves!

However Button did NOT like being ignored and is yelling at me to come and pay her some attention...

Meanwhile the rest of the hens and cockerels were having a snack on the remains of the carrots from last year!  I grew them in tubs which worked well but some were not worth pulling up but seem to have grown recently!  So - snack time for hens...

Did I mention Button?  Well clearly something distracted her...thankfully!

And then the weather went a bit weird for a while.  There were some short rain showers before the sun came back.

But a lovely afternoon in the garden for all of us, enjoying some warmth and sun!