Probably perfect timing since it’s going to snow, apparently!
But a blessed nuisance because I’ve started watering in the greenhouse and I need the water on the outside too to keep the chicken’s water supply clean and fresh.
This time it seems the wind is to blame for rocking the chicken run fencing and gate.

Attached to the gatepost is the water pipe and tap connected to an underground T joint. Which means that to fix it, a large hole needs digging down to reach the junction.
Fiddle sticks. That’s a big job.

I’m beginning to think that outside water pipes are a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe I should rely on the water butts for watering most of my plants and for the chickens. I can’t use it in the greenhouse for seedlings and young plants but once they’ve been weaned off the greenhouse conditions, rainwater is by far the best way to water plants and it does seem completely bonkers to be using what is in effect drinking water to water the garden plants.

Not that I water them often, but I do at least have a choice.

It smells of plants, it’s warm and bright and everything looks healthy and happy and sprouting.

But it’s January and it should be cold and dark and dreary.
Some days it is, but the plants in my greenhouse haven’t noticed and I’m starting to think I should have been sowing in earnest and the guess what, snow is forecast and everything hits a wall of cold.

They say the plants are confused and looking inside my greenhouse I’d agree with that. The greenhouse peach never did go through autumn.
It dropped a few leaves over Christmas but still sports some very green and very healthy looking foliage.
There’s little sign of any flower buds which is a real disappointment as my bees loved visiting it last spring and of course that means we wont’ get much fruit either.
Actually, let’s recap, the fruit was tiny and pretty useless anyway, so why am I worrying? Why not simply replace it with something that will perform properly, flower this year (to feed the bees) and produce some sumptuous fruit in the summer?

Note to self – read blog and react.
Go and buy a new peach or an apricot or both and stop trying to nurture plants that really aren’t that good to start with, it’s a waste of time and effort.

Rare, but it does happen.
I’ve spotted an interesting company at Hampton Court last year that makes photo voltaic glass panels for greenhouses and does a retro fit service.

You replace your glazing with the PV glazing and it shades your plants in the heat of the summer and generates electricity.
You need a fairly big greenhouse to make it work and of course it costs a bit.
Plus in winter and early spring there is a reduction in the light that reaches your plants. You could alleviate that with low energy growing lights, but does that make sense???

I’m torn for several reasons.
It would be good to generate some energy from the sun, and greenhouse shading would be a bonus, but can I justify the cost?
Since the dear Government has halved the feed in tariff, though this is being challenged at the moment, solar panels are not such a good investment.

Then there’s the upheaval, I would need to completely empty the greenhouse within the growing season.
That’s partly good because it does need doing, but a major challenge to fit around work. Plus, like most people there are plenty of other things that need attention in and around the house.
So I am mulling it over.

Watch this space.

My huge Mahonia bush is covered in racemes of bright yellow flowers that smell delicious. There are several types of viburnum in flower too as well as some hellebores.

I love to see the first shoots and flowers of winter and early spring, especially when the weather is so murky and dismal and yet these plants never fail to put on a show.
The snowdrops especially are a delight.
They are so delicate and elegant early in the season when there is little else around.
Last winter I was amazed to see how popular they were with my bees. I’d read that snowdrops were good for honeybees when they first emerged in February but I’d never seen bees visiting the flowers: Probably because we didn’t have a strong population of honeybees here at that time.
It’s a great area for snowdrops and there are loads in the woods and in neighbouring gardens, most of them have been there for decades and have never ever been treated with chemicals or even fertilisers and yet still put on a fabulous display.
Their purity is vital for my little bees, for even a sniff of modern pesticides could be enough to cause damage to the baby bees and the future of the hive.

A depressing thought.

I’ve dug some overgrown snowdrop clumps out of the garden and they are on the greenhouse bench to be divided into smaller clumps, some for replanting and some to pot up for my friends.

It’s my next greenhouse job and now I’ve got the key back, as long as I wrap up warm, I can put the greenhouse lights on and pot them up at night.

It’s not just the daylight hours that are getting longer; the greenhouse working time is drawing out too at last.

It wont be long before the days are obviously longer and spring will be knocking on the door.

Of course I know that the heavily egg loaded girlies spend winter hibernating and have already had their wedding flights so are ready and able to lay their eggs at the start of spring. But to have four in the house in one winter beggars belief.

The first three came in with the kindling. I’d cut and dried sprigs of bay laurel and fir cones to start the woodburner naturally and boy do they work a treat.
Trouble is the boxes of kindling were the perfect hibernation spot for a few of the Queenies for the winter. I’ve had a couple of wasp nests every year in the garden and I do try and let them do their own thing.
Most people don’t realise that wasps eat a massive amount of garden pests early in the season.

In late summer I had one massive momma whizzing around my head in the greenhouse.
She was looking for somewhere to overwinter and the greenhouse was a perfect choice. I don’t blame her, its warm and protected and there are few predators. I really didn’t relish the thought of unearthing her accidentally when working in there, but as I couldn’t catch her and I didn’t know where she went, I had to let her get on with it.

Then last week I bought a pot of greenhouse hyacinths into the house.
It’s been prettified with some moss around the bulbs and looks lovely on the kitchen windowsill.
The very next day, there was a huge hornet sized Queen wasp flying around the kitchen lights and I can only assume she had nested under the moss and was awakened in the warm of the kitchen.
It’s got me thinking though! I gave several friends and neighbours pots of hyacinths as gifts.
I wonder whether there were any other surprises in their Christmas presents, or whether I was just unlucky to get the only greenhouse wasp in mine.
Oops.

Oh and if you were wondering, every single one of them was captured gently and released back outside. I didn’t give them the train fare home, but I gave them a fair chance of survival even though they bully my bees.

While I could look through the windows to see how they are doing there are many reasons why this is a no no.
For a start I have strapped down the beehive lids through the window handle so unless I untie all the strapping I can’t actually open the window.
That’s the practical reason and it’s a good thing too. But at this time of year the bees need every joule of energy to survive and any interference from me will result in a disturbance that could stress them out and make them use valuable food reserves (honey).
If I open the window I will release some heat, let in the light and make a noise that they will investigate and the chances are I won’t be able to see much anyway, nothing except the empty combs at the edge of the colony.
The bees will be clustered tight around the queen keeping warm. If I look closely I can see a slight heat haze over both hives in the cold, which suggests that they are very much alive in there.

I did see one flying bee on Winter Solstice and another on Christmas day, both from my original hive and both returning to the nest, so I know there are some bees alive.
I have to confess to being extremely excited when I saw them and was spotted dancing madly around the garden singing I’ve seen a bee.
Fortunately I wasn’t carted off to the asylum and have been able to write my blogs this week, but if there is a gap in productivity, well you know what has happened!
I had a couple of fantastic bee books for Christmas so I am reading more about these amazing little creatures and have already learned that my queen bees will have started laying eggs again on the Winter Solstice (amazing timing), so the next new bees to hatch will be in about ten days time, they’ll need plenty of food so I hope there is enough in there for them all.

Last winter my colony survived despite all my fears and I learned that they really do know what they are doing, so this year I am trusting them to come through the winter and just watching from afar with my fingers crossed. I hope it is enough.

Oh dear, the warm weather and another slip up with the greenhouse key saw some slight neglect in the greenhouse department over Christmas.

The main greenhouse key went AWOL again and though there is now a stalwart backup, it’s attached to the other vital house keys and not that easy to transport down the garden.
Then despite my insider Industry warnings of snow and harsh winters, it’s been warm, not a sign of snow anywhere, well at least not in this neck of the woods this last week.

The result: greenhouse botrytis.

My fault as I wasn’t vigilant in the ventilation department and I’d left my cuttings nestling in a propagator wrapped in swaddling bubble wrap for a few days too long while I searched for the missing key.
It finally surfaced rather sheepishly from the desk in my office!
Can’t work that one out at all, but that’s where it was, planted there more likely I am sure by a villain too embarrassed to own up to moving it!!

OK it’s just a key, but it’s my greenhouse key and is the essential access to my glazed escape pod in the garden.
The damage (to my plants) is not disastrous, just disappointing.
A few are lost forever to the dusty, smoky, puffy and no doubt horrific botrytis black death, but the others I think were saved in the nick of time.
Well, I hope!

The rest of the greenhouse plants were quite oblivious to the neglect and all seems hale and hearty in there for now at least.

It’s always the same in January, greenhouse gardeners across the nation tentatively sow a few seeds in heated propagators, urging the spring to arrive, we order our seeds, drool over exotic temptations and wash a few pots in readiness.

Then it’s February before we know it, a month so short that if you blink, or lose the greenhouse key you’ve missed it and then it’s March.
I never learn, I always mean to be better prepared, ready for anything and ready for spring and yet somehow, work gets in the way and I never am.

This year will be different.
I will resolve to be more organised in the office and greenhouse.
Actually, that’s not going to happen.
I resolve to be honest with myself and my expectations and to garden within my time budget and my limits, to sow and grow seedlings that I will have time to nurture from seed to harvest, to keep my greenhouse full of things that I will be here to attend to their every need and to install my automatic watering system in the greenhouse and fit my new Hozelock self winding Auto Reel that I was sent last March, so that I can water garden, greenhouse and probably next door’s too with little effort and great ease.

There, it’s in black and white now so I will have to get on with it all and pronto.

Then a couple of months ago I had a phone call from the wildlife rescue centre asking to come up and see the garden again.
The release officer was extremely pleased to see how overgrown parts of the garden are and that it leads out onto the nature reserve and woodland behind the house.

To be honest we weren’t expecting any hogs until spring, but this female was of good weight and ready to hibernate and the centre wanted to get her out into the wild as soon as possible.
She will be confined to a small area and fed for a few days while she becomes accustomed to the sounds and smells of this new site and then during a mild spell, she will be released to find her own special place to overwinter.

We already know that the previous releases are alive and well, so the hope is that this little prickly ball will extend the gene pool and breed with the others.
Fantastic.

Since we don’t use any chemicals or slug pellets and my neighbours don’t either, she has a great chance of staying safe and well and soon we may hear the patter of prickly little feet.

What a wonderful Christmas delivery.

The skins are tougher but the flavour is divine. There a handful of potatoes planted in the summer that should provide enough little spuds for a lunch.
There’s garlic and onions that are drying in there ready to roast with the turkey, spuds and parsnips, but the best flavour is going to come from my herbs and salads.
I’ve got a forest of pea-shoots that I am saving for a risotto, a jungle of green mustard and spinach that will pep up a nut roast and some basil seedlings that will be sacrificed to add some flavour to winter soups and roasted cous cous.
In fact wherever I can add some fresh and homegrown produce to the winter fare is a positive move.
They are so packed with vitamins at this time of year and a vital part of staying healthy.

Where I can’t use home-grown produce I have restricted our veg diet to locally grown food and will source everything else from a market gardener and organic grower that sells on the local market, It makes sense to eat local food for lots of reasons, not just the food miles.

Whatever your plans for the season ahead, make sure your greenhouse is weatherproof and safe.
Ventilate on sunny days but remember to close it properly after every visit and repair any damage swiftly.