Cold start to spring

So a couple of weeks back, we had nice warm temperatures. In February. But since then it's been a combination of rain, wind or the odd named storm... or two.

So trips down the allotment have been sporadic at best and mostly consisted of dashing in, dropping off the kitchen waste in the compost and then heading for home to warm up. Yesterday the weather was abysmal. But today should have been better. We it started off with a short hail storm, but there was plenty of sunshine promised.

The Daffs are in full flower. In fact this photo I grabbed last week but they're still going strong.

The Rhubarb is also starting to poke it's head out.

But if you think back a few years I had another rhubarb that was given away to friend of mine. Well look how well that one is doing on her plot.

There are many different varieties of rhubarb, and I honestly have no idea what mine is because it was already on the plot when I took it over all those years ago. All I know is that it's a regular guaranteed production which is utilised by me mostly as a jam, in combination with ginger.

We tried growing ginger this winter. We managed to get it to sprout quite well and had a stem some 20cm tall with a couple of leaves on it. But for some reason it never got any bigger and eventually died. Now we did keep it quite warm, in the kitchen, but whether it was too close to the window and got hit by a cold snap I can;t be sure, Either way, our attempt to grow our our ginger failed... for now. We'll try again later in the year and see how that goes.

Meanwhile the George that we kept in the kitchen, on top of the cupboards, had reached the end of it's "shelf" life. So it's time to cut it up and get hold of the seeds. But Muppet here, forgot to bring the knife. Fortunately a shovel does the trick, albeit one that's rather dirty.

Other than that, it's a little cold and windy out to be doing much. I did end up clearing some of the weeds in the onion bed. This bed was a sea of green, so although it doesn't look like I've taken a lot of weeds out, I removed two buckets of weeds.

By the time we'd done that (and had a good old chat over coffee with other allotmenteers) there were some serious dark clouds looming, so we thought that it would be best to call it a day. By the time we got home we had a huge hail storm, which turned the top of the car white as if it had snowed. Just as well we missed that. I can only hope that we get some decent weather soon.