Ten years ago a friend phoned to say someone had dumped five geese on her front lawn. We had no experience whatsoever of keeping geese, but I proved rather adept at catching them and they came back to ours in the boot of the car.
First Goose Egg of 2022
Ten years to the day since then we have the first goose egg of 2022. Valentine's Day is the traditional date for this but it varies from goose to goose and year to year.
Over the last decade the geese have given us quite a few eggs, a few goslings and they have done a lot of grass cutting for me, as well as spreading a good amount of manure.
Garden Spring Clean (meteorolical refers to The Spring, not the extent of the clearing up!)
The problem with going on holiday in February (not that I'm complaining) is that I am already a little behind schedule and at the mercy of the weather. We are now officially in meteorological Spring and it began with one of those gorgeous spring days we love so much.
After finishing taking the breasts off the pigeons we were gifted, I devoted some time to weeding out perennials from the veg beds. The war against grasses, docks, nettles and creeping buttercup is a never-ending one, but it does get easier with persistence and if you pick the right soil conditions to perform the extraction.
New growth is coming up rapidly now so I have been tidying up the overwintered dead stems. These provide important food and habitats to wildlife during the depths of winter and plants such as teasel, cardoon and fennel give visual interest too. But now it's time they contributed to the compost heap. Before too long they'll be unrecognisable and back on the surface of the veg beds as finished compost.
