Ups and downs

Erratic weather has its good and bad points

- Val Bourne

GARDENING is rather like swings and roundabouts, because every year is different. You get a bumper crop of carrots one year, followed by a crop failure the next. You struggle with a glut of tomatoes in August, only to fail the following year.

Our erratic weather, caused by climate change, is making growing crops harder than ever. And the topsy-turvy winter we’ve just had didn’t help. We seemed to get our winter in March this year: it was dull, wet and cold. It was definitely a case of Almost Spring Cottage, Cold Cold Aston.

I left my seed sowing to the end of March this year, but germination proved to be slow even though I use heated propagators. These propagators do help, but the seeds still seem to sense that the time isn’t quite right. I look back fondly on the lockdown spring of 2020, when warm sunshine shone every day. My seeds grew with enthusiasm, the perennials shot up and the apple blossom was fully out by 10 April.