Start of my gardening season

 

Of course, my thoughts are with the people in Ukraine fighting and suffering for freedom 💙💛. But there is so little we can do, accept praying an hoping for the best 🙏. Meanwhile I'm very happy to have a hobby to loose myself in, to take away my thoughts away for a while. I hope every one can find a way to handle this. 

Actually my new gardening season just started. It's still cold outside, but beautiful weather. Frosty in the nights. Blue skies, lots of sun and a frosty ground special in de shadow. Still very long shadows, the sun isn't that high yet. In two weeks we reach the summer half year with more light. We live in the Swedish climate zone 4-5, even in the south, in the middle of Småland. It can take till May before we get rid of the frost and really have spring temperatures. Sometimes we have some nice spring like days, mostly it changes all of a sudden into summertime beginning of May without a real spring feeling. 

We started cleaning up the left leaves from autumn (when the snow came in so suddenly and unexpected) and some souvenirs such as branches everywhere from the winter storms. Only some weeks to go and the garden will look totally fresh green like if there was no winter at all, a fresh full grown flowering garden. Unbelievable, there's so much power in natures DNA.

Now it's time to prepare, to give plants the best start ever. Today we have been cutting the willow tree too, it needs to be done every 2-3 years. We can use the branches to create a sculpture. We started cutting back old parts of grasses and plants. I prepared the beds outside for seeding in some weeks. Same time a tried to weed already a little, but actually it is still too cold for your fingers. 

At the same time we started to sow inside. I started with some early seeds, such as tomatoes, night beauties, Gazania, Gaura (Sommarljus), Petunia and Akleja. Around ten days later, they will germinate because of the warmth. Time to move them from my mini greenhouse to a cooler place in the house and saw a new round in the greenhouse. A lot of seeds cannot wait to grow...

So proud on the first seedlings...💚