I need to be active and on the move so the recent spell of extremely cold weather caused me a lot of problems. I couldn’t get into the garden, other than to pick vegetables, as it was frozen, so I set off for the greenhouse.
KEEPING BUSY
As I do keep up to date with work in there, the potential for jobs was severely limited. I swept the quarry tiled floor – twice – brushed any soil or other debris off the working surfaces, checked all the plants, did a tiny tad of watering and that was it. All over in about an hour.
I mooched around the garden, picking up the odd leaf and tree branch from the recent winds, and after an hour I was cold and miserable. I know, I’ll sort my seeds out.
Only to find that I completed that in the last cold spell. I’ve got tomato seedlings growing under cover in the dining room. They’ll definitely need some attention. Well, apart from wishing them good morning, nothing else was needed.
The sheds, they need a good tidy up. No, they didn’t, nor the garages. In the end I went upstairs to the attic room where I keep all my fishing equipment. My fly box is a real mess. But it wasn’t.
For the second time I asked Mrs GG which vegetables she wanted, only to be told that I’d already got them in first thing in the morning. Quite clearly my memory as well as my temper was declining. Then she asked, with a wry smile, why I didn’t sort out all my old gardening magazines? I usually take the really old copies to my doctors’ surgery but as they’ve been closed for the best part of a year, what’s the point – and in any event Covid restrictions means they couldn’t accept them.
MAGAZINES GALORE
So, I lumbered around the house, collecting up magazines from loos, bedrooms and back up in my attic. In no time at all I had a gigantic pile. I intended to get them into date order first, but before I got to March 2019 there was a fascinating article on something or other, I forget precisely what. Anyway, I idled away the morning and best part of the afternoon reading various articles I had either missed or completely forgotten I’d read.
Before I knew it, I was being told to go and change for supper.
In the end, I’d actually enjoyed my day, and felt a sort of sense of achievement and so I sat down, after the meal, with a smile to watch the news and weather report.
That was a big mistake.
The news was utterly depressing and the weather lady confirmed that the cold weather was here to stay – for the rest of the week at least. Gloom descended on me so I went back to the pile of gardening magazines, rummaged down towards the bottom, and picked up a February 2018 edition. There it was, emblazoned across the front page “What to do in the garden during the big freeze”. This made my smile return, and the sunshine and warmer temperatures this week have made me smile even further.
Read other blogs by Graham here: www.paskettpr.co.uk/the-grumpy-gardener