Me V's the Frost!

Another fierce frost followed by another glorious day. We could do so much in the garden if only the ground wasn’t so cold. It does seem churlish to complain, and I know there will be many awful rainy and overcast days ahead but I am so desperate to get on. The small bit of salad we have in the tunnels is just sitting there, we haven’t one daffodil in flower and as our garden is north facing the frost hangs around until mid day.
Meanwhile, we are cleaning up the place. We’ve cut down a diseased flowering cherry this morning. A few more logs for the fire next winter. I was helping Peter clearing up the debris when the plumber arrived to sort out a problem with the solar panels. It is always amazes me how easy it is to be distracted. So I thought I’d come in and start this. Now I’m about to be distracted from this to get some lunch. Sometimes I yearn for a day that I can go out into the garden and work all day without having to think about anything else.
I’m back, back to the hedges. This is one job that has to be done in the next couple of weeks, before the birds start nesting in earnest. We have Grisilinia sheltering our vegetable garden and vast amounts of Escallonia elsewhere. I wish now that we hadn’t used Grisilinia but at the time I thought the fresh green of its leaves contrasted well with the Escallonia we had everywhere else. It grew so fast and did the job required very quickly, but it is so vigorous that it’s major job every spring to keep it under control. Originally we clipped it into a pretty wavy edged hedge but that is long gone. Escallonia also grows very fast but can be really hacked back if it gets out of control and, amazingly it will come back from just stumps. Of course, if we took out the hedge trimmers more often during the summer we wouldn’t have so much work to do each spring, but in a large garden with limited labour, hedges are the last thing on my mind.
I feel a little panic setting in when I think of all the work to be done before Easter when we open. The weeks are flying by and each day I seem to be slipping back a little bit more. I have even brought the propagator and trays of seedlings into the conservatory to speed things up a bit, but we couldn’t put anything out anyway.
So patience is the order of the day.