Spring is here.Time to start gardening

Spring is probably the busiest season in the garden. Plants are waking up, mulch needs to be removed, winter clean-up has to be done, and all before you can start planting this year’s garden.

If you have large clumps of herbaceous perennials it’s a good time to divide and replant them, as this will increase their vigour and provide spare plants for your garden. Use two forks back to back to split the clumps and water generously after replanting.

Start the growing season off right by filling your gardens with cool season flowers and vegetables. Some of these plants are hardier than we are and can be planted outdoors even before the threat of frost is past. Others may need a bit of coddling to begin with, but cool spring weather is when they shine, so don’t miss out by waiting too long to plant them

You can get a great range if seeds or plants online at places such as here:
garden centre online

Happy spring gardening

What is Mothers Day?

mothers day flowers

In most countries, Mother’s Day is a recent observance derived from the holiday as it has evolved in North America and Europe. When it was adopted by other countries and cultures, it was given different meanings, associated to different events (religious, historical or legendary), and celebrated in a different date or dates.

Some countries already had existing celebrations honoring motherhood, and their celebrations have adopted several external characteristics from the UK holiday, like giving carnations and other presents to your own mother.

The extent of the celebrations varies greatly. In some countries, it is potentially offensive to one’s mother not to mark Mother’s Day. In others, it is a little-known festival celebrated mainly by immigrants, or covered by the media as a taste of foreign culture (compare the celebrations of Diwali in the UK and the United States). In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Mothering Sunday falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent, exactly three weeks before Easter Sunday (14 March in 2010). It is believed to have originated from the 16th century Christian practice of visiting one’s mother church annually, which meant that most mothers would be reunited with their children on this day. Most historians believe that young apprentices and young women in servitude were released by their masters that weekend in order to visit their families.[30] As a result of secularization, it is now principally used to show appreciation to one’s mother, although it is still recognized in the historical sense by some churches, with attention paid to Mary the mother of Jesus Christ as well as the traditional concept ‘Mother Church’.

Nine years after the first official Mother’s Day, commercialization of the British holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become and spent all her inheritance and the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the celebration.[1]

Later commercial and other exploitations of the use of Mother’s Day infuriated Anna and she made her criticisms explicitly known throughout her time.[1][31] She criticized the practice of purchasing greeting cards, which she saw as a sign of being too lazy to write a personal letter. She was arrested in 1948 in the U.S.A. for disturbing the peace while protesting against the commercialization of Mother’s Day, and she finally said that she “wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control”

Mother’s Day continues to this day to be one of the commercially most successful British and U.S. occasions. According to the National Restaurant Association, Mother’s Day is now the most popular day of the year to dine out at a restaurant in the United States

We still think that the best gift you can get a mother on mothers day are flowers. You can send them anywhere in the UK from a site like here and why wouldnt you want to brighten up the day of that special person in your life.

March Gardening

march gardening

Have a good tidy up and finish those odd construction jobs because you are going to be busier still later in the year.
If you have any horticultural fleece, you can peg that onto the ground a week or so before you plant. The small rise in temperature of the soil can make a big difference
Sowing, Planting and Cultivating

If the weather permits you can plant your onion and shallot sets. March is usually the right time to establish an asparagus bed if you are starting from crowns. Mid March should let you start planting those early potatoes you’ve had chitting and talking of root crops, you can plant Jerusalem artichoke tubers now.