Seeds

It's been a long weekend off, enabling us to spend Friday in Scarborough with Liz's grandparents, and then staying with my parents until Saturday evening. All very relaxing, and set us up well to get back into some wood chopping. We've been burning wood all winter, but haven't been tackling our backlog of firewood for some time, distracted by work on the house, and put off by bad weather (swinging a splitting maul in the snow isn't the safest activity). The weather's been better, though, and so we spent a few hours yesterday sawing and splitting a couple of cubic metres worth, and stacked it today. We're also making progress on getting the rubble from de-plastering the house walls bagged up and carted away, to build a terrace/silage access ramp for a neighbour.

We've also started sowing seeds in earnest: I did a load of sweet peas at the start of the month, most of which have come up well, so today we've sown all our RHS seeds, some cauliflowers (All The Year Round), some more sweet peas (Orange Dragon, more Fragrantissima, Cream Southbourne), and the broad beans (Witkiem Manita and Green Longpod). We also potted up some bareroot shrubs that have arrived: two Viburnum 'Bodnantense Dawn', two winter honeysuckles (Lonicera fragrantissima), a mahonia 'Charity' and a winter box (Sarcococca confusa).

The RHS seeds:

• Orlaya grandiflora or white laceflower
• Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea
• Agastache rugosa or Korean mint
• Angelica archangelica
• Cephalaria gigantea or giant scabious
• Chaerophyllum aureum or golden chervil
• Erodium manescavii
• Scabiosa columbaria
• Succisa pratensis or devil's bit scabious
• Succisella inflexa
• Thalictrum delavayi or Chinese meadow rue

Lastly: the snowdrops are doing pretty well, considering that it's their first year. Quite a few are up, but still small, so we're hopeful that this year will be them establishing themselves, and they'll be even better next February.