An (almost) spring morning

I woke this morning to sunshine streaming through my windows and a perfectly blue sky. This seems to rarely happen on a weekend so I was quickly up, dressed and out the back door into the garden. For the first time in months I was able to sit outside in the sunshine for breakfast - mixed berry porridge with maple syrup and coffee. It was also lovely and warm and I soon peeled off my jumper and soaked up some Vitamin D while I was at it.

Then it was onto a few garden jobs. First of the list was the lawn. You might remember a few weeks back I put down some Kikuyu seeds to try and get the grass looking a bit better. I had initially been really hesitant to use a self-repairing variety as I was worried it would take over the garden. So far it is looking great and has really thickened up and filled in a lot of the gaps. It has grown really long with all this rain so I've cut it right back. One of the challenges (or benefits) of a tiny garden is that it is too small to mow. The patch of grass is about 1m wide and 3m long, so big enough for lying in the sunshine and adding a bit of green to the garden, but not for much else. When I initially planted it I bought a pair of clippers that have worked really well. The man in the hardware shop thought I was completely nuts when I said what I wanted them for, but it really has its benefits. It only takes me about 10 mins to do the whole lawn, and also is a good opportunity to get down close to it and pull up the clover and other weeds as I go.

Next, I had a look around the garden and checked on how everything was going. The sweetpeas are getting bigger and are appearing on almost all of the plants now. The vines themselves are still quite small and I suspect I should have pinched off the first flowers to promote growth first.

Last winter I planted some freesia's around the garden but didn't see a single flower out of them. This morning when I went outside I noticed this beautiful purple one growing next to some kale in the vegetable patch. It must have slept all last winter and decided to wait until this year to come out.

The lemon tree is showing some amazing growth with new leaves popping up all over it. I was also surprised to see there are tiny flowers sprouting out of the branches. Hopefully I get at least one lemon this year!

While admiring the beautiful orange of this succulent flower I discovered it is covered in little bugs which I suspect are aphids. They look a little like baby grasshoppers but are much too small. I've heard just spraying with water is one way to get rid of them, but I'm open to any other suggestions!

Finally, after embarking on a few other projects which I'll talk about later, I gave the whole garden a good water with some Seasol. By this time the sky was clouding over and the sun had long gone, so I was quite happy to head back inside and close off the fishy seaweed smell!