WordPress tells me the last time I shared plot progress with you was in July 2024, which makes me a very bad blogger and I can’t promise I’ll be any better this year…

Any how, it’s March and shoots are shooting.

Back in July I was upset at the lack of progress with autumn raspberries. It’s still slow with most of these new Joan Js doing a good impersonation of dead sticks. Further along the same row are the summer raspberries, Summer Cascade which seem set on plot domination. They have set a nearly straight line in the bed I had intended for the autumn raspberries – with such precision I didn’t have the heart to pull them out. Please send your raspberry recipes!

I blinked and noticed the pear trees covered in tightly held buds of blossom waiting to burst open.

Red sensation
Merton pride
Beth

The flowers are making progress

Hybrid tea roses
tulips
Nigella
New peony patch

I spied the first new asparagus tips breaking through the soil today. It will report back that conditions are favourable and the rest will follow…

and finally to make sense of the cover photo, the junk pile is no more, or rather it is ashes. It was a mum and son Friday evening to make the fire and eat chips while it burned down. I emptied the wooden crate of the assorted grot that had been deposited by numerous plot holders and made a neat pile at the back of the car park. When the long promised council skip makes an appearance it will be a short job to fill it up. The space now makes it possible for me to finish digging this patch and plan my new flower ‘farm’. I’ve covered it with a taurpaulin in the hope of preventing it setting like concrete in the sun.