May 14 Hello Blossom!

http://www.llettycottage.co.uk

Why does it always seem to catch me off guard?  Spring arrives  quickly and the garden looks as though I’ve never touched it! The grass is growing ridiculously quickly, the weeds are everywhere, the soil needs digging over  and  I’m trying to sow   seeds for summer  veg and flowers!  Good job I love gardening!

Our little magnolia tree has flowered for the first time today…hooray!

The new visitors on the block  are the moorhen chicks which are scooting over the pond as though they are on hoverboards!  I’ve only seen 4 chicks  so far   but more may appear tomorrow. We have had a moorhen on our pond for eight years. We don’t know if it’s the same one or it may be one of the  chicks that grows up and stays. Through the winter we usually have two moorhens on the pond but last winter  there was only one. So another one must have flown in early Spring.

  The  camera was on full zoom  so poor photos of an adult moorhen with two chicks and a chick  ( the black spot!) running underneath the gunnera  (which shows frost damage on its leaves!)

The Canada Geese and  their 6 goslings  do not like the intrusion of more babies on ‘their’ pond so after a quick feed  this morning  they have walked over the fields to  another  pond.

The garden looks very springlike in the evening sunshine  and many plants are bursting with colour and growing so quickly.

Pretty cowslips in the long meadow grass.

 

                                  

The crab apples and fruit trees are all looking  glorious  with their beautiful blossom – fingers crossed that we don’t get a late frost like last year .

     

I thought I’d try to be clever and start at the first tree in the row  and take a photo of all the trees in order  so I could recall which blossom went with which tree! No chance – as I took two photos  sometimes of the same tree- never mind!

This one is definitely  a crab apple as helpfully  there’s a crab apple left on from last autumn that the birds have somehow missed!

 

Just look who’s coming back over the fields for the night- hope the moorhen chicks are safely tucked up in bed for the night or there’ll be ructions!

We went into Llandeilo today to buy  some plants- two new roses from the Works Nursery.  The Works    http://www.worksantiques.co.uk/  is an amazing place. There’s a  garden centre, a wonderful cafe  and an antiques  shop, which is like a rabbit warren as it goes on for ever with  wondrous things to discover round every corner. I bought two new pretty cups and saucers for the cottage which are now on  a tray ready for the   new visitors tomorrow from Australia.

Happy Gardening everyone!