Tackling weeds, spying shoots, getting started again

We have emerged out of the strange post Christmas limbo, where we loaf about picking at marzipan, watching films with a thousand red and cinnamon-scented candles glowing, pondering a plate of cheese at 10pm. We have emerged into what should be reality, but isn't. Phrases like "back to normal" are no longer being used - as I write, the UK is into its third lockdown. It's only day two, and there is much less of the hope of before. In March we were baking banana bread, planting seeds, doorstep chatting shielding the sun from our eyes. Now it's January and a different story. The 'new variant' (and Christmas easing) has made doing things like going into shops or getting a takeaway coffee riskier, less appealing. And it's very cold! The first few days of 2021 were drab in both national mood and weather, and for the past 48 hours I have been under a blanket, munching on leftover Christmas food, categorically not-going-running and staring out of the window at the rain like I'm in a Chekhov play. 

We have all been suffering from low mood and that's been difficult, especially when poor weather doesn't exactly make you want to get up and out. But today, it stopped raining finally! I went outside and it felt good - the roads were quieter, the beach was much more deserted (apart from a few chilly dog walkers). I came home under a blue sky and with the sun warm on my face, and flatly looked at all the weeds that had crept in over the past couple of months. Without my usual watchful eye, it frankly looked a bit shit, so I decided to tackle the weeds head-on. I hauled the garden bin round to the front, and armed with gloves, a hard brush, secateurs, and a curiously piratey-looking weeding knife gifted to me from my mum which is absolutely invaluable. 

An hour later, and with the help of my wife taking it in turns to do either weeding or sweeping, we'd got every little dandelion and spike of grass up from between the paving, and lifted every sneaky little weed from all of the (many) plant pots. 

I've mentioned before in this blog how the front garden should be our "gift to the street" (plus doorstep chats are back as I said!) - so we've brought out a lot of the container plants from the back garden to showcase them out here. The sedums have been amazing and I didn't dead-head them as their brown umbrella-like heads looked great in the frosty months just gone. And now they have their little miniature pinwheel new growth unfurling at soil level - so the old stems have gone to make way for the new. It all started to feel hopeful again once I saw those. 

I also saw to my GREAT excitement that erigeron karvinskianus has self seeded, joy of joys, amid the paving cracks. I know this sounds like a death wish as this spreads like wild fire but it's SO gorgeous and I have a LOT of paving that it will look lovely once it's all started spreading. 

So it was only an hour, and then the little speckles of rain began and I started hankering for a sandwich and a cup of tea, but it felt good. I came in, shook a little snail hitchhiker off my boots, and now I'm under a blanket again (picking at marzipan) on the Sarah Raven website planning what to spend my christmas vouchers on. And somehow, it feels like spring might be just around the corner.