Monday 3 March 2008

Frogspawn!

I know I end a lot of my titles with exclamation marks, but I do find all this awfully exciting!

We found the first frogspawn in our pond yesterday! (I'd like to think it was really laid the day before - the first of March - but perhaps that's just me being romantic.) Isn't this a bit early? There's no way I can trek out there every night to cover it up in case it freezes. Ah well, nature is as nature does.


We planted our trees too, though it's all we had time for in between seeing mothers!
I thought about planting them in submerged pots or planting bags, as lilymarlene suggested, because I might want to move them in future, but they're fairly cheap trees and the cost of three planting bags didn't seem worth it.
So in the end I decided to plant them in the ground, and if I do need to move them I'll just have to take the risk. I dug out a bucketful of soil, mixed it with rotted manure - so the roots won't need to go searching for nutrition and the rootball should remain fairly small - and vermiculite to retain water, since the planting instructions really stressed the importance of moisture while the tree develops, then I refilled the hole with the mix and planted into it. I also put a plastic tube cut from a drinks bottle round each one to offer a little protection in the early days. I hope they're all right out there in the cold and wind!


I've also potted up my TEN free bareroot echinacea plants. TEN! What am I going to do with TEN?! I think some people are going to be getting plants for Easter...

Jobs for this week are to dig over the onion patch and plant the onions, shallots and garlic (ASAP!), and to get down to some serious seed sowing. Can't wait!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi. I don't think you need to worry about the grog spawn freezing. It always freezes in my home pond and doesn't do it any harm at all. I've just dug a pond on my allotment and I'll be taking a bucket of spawn over in a couple of weeks time.

Simon

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