April 2022

Lemon Yellow Sunflower.

Strangely enough or odd enough April started on April's fools day with snow. The rest of the month, the temperature went up slightly and we even did reach at one point a blessed 17 degrees Celcius.

In terms of Flowers, the Daffodils showed up and the Narcissus as well. The Hellebore are still putting a charming display all year round. But also they are also producing little pockets of Seeds now, especially the white one which have speckles of red in.

Our Black Hellebores. We have also some dark pink almost burgundy ones.

The Tulips the orange to red ones have now died down. But the Black ones didn't appear. Maybe they will do so at a different time of the year. However what did appear are the Strawberries flowers and the Nettle flowers. I fancy trying my hand at doing Nettle Soup at some point later this year.

 Flowering Strawberries.

The other flowers we do have now, only a couple which appeared at the end of the month are a couple of Courgettes flowers. Those two Courgettes plants are the only ones alive from the four I planted from old, out of date seeds in December-January this year. All of them did show up initialy. But one young seedling died and when we did put the last three outside in mid April when the weather was fairer ony two did cope from the change of indoors to outdoors and are now blossoming, while the other one did perish. It is a shame but at least we have two survivors which is better than nothing so we probably can hope to have Courgettes to eat this year.

  Courgette flower. 

We also planted outside our 8 plugs of Red Cabbage called Red Flame and the 8 plugs of Cauliflower of the variety White Excel. We never grown Cabbages or Cauliflowers before so it will be an interesting experience for us to see how it goes. I must confess that I would love to do Cauliflower and Cheese with our home grown ones but not only that Dish. As for the Cabbages I am thinking more in terms of Stir Fry, Slaw and do stuffed little parcels with the Leaves.

Home Made Slaw with Red Cabbage, Fennel and Sweet Bell Red Pepper with home Made Dill and chopped Parsley Mayonnaise.

As for our Garden Fauna, we have two babies Robin which are a joy to see. They fledged the last week of April. One of our Magpies has a nest, she is coming very often to feed her chicks taking lots of wormies.