A sunny day in the garden

We had a lot of warm, sunny intervals today and spent much of the day in the garden. I was quite warm planting garlic just before lunch and nearly took my coat off.

The birds have been singing their little hearts out today in contrast to their silence when it snowed. It was lovely to hear them.

It's a bit late to be planting garlic, but I didn't have the energy to plant anything last Autumn, and hubby kindly bought me some Spring planting garlic. I've read that they really need some frost if they are to do well, and when I planted them, perhaps a bit later in February last year, they didn't seem to do anything until the Autumn. However, you are meant to be able to plant garlic in February if it is the right kind and we do have cold weather forecast for the next two or three weeks, although it might be warming up over the next few days.

I also planted a few heather plants my parents gave me for my birthday back in January as the weather and soil haven't really been suitable until now. As our soil isn't particularly acid I chose Erica Carnea, which flowers in Winter when not much else does, and tolerates a higher PH (less acid) than most heathers.

Hubby did a lot of general clearing up and our son moved my bird table higher up the garden away from the area where we want the chickens to go to begin with. We have been told they should be delivered on Monday.

Last Sunday we put our new wooden compost bin together. We just had to slot all the planks in place. Eventually we want it to go where the black bin is now (see photo), but when I thought about moving it I found a frog hibernating inside, so I put him back and covered him with the clods of earth I had removed and put the bin back on top. I hope he didn't come to any harm. I wasn't expecting to find him in there, but then nor was I expecting to find clods of earth in a compost bin. Apparently hubby is trying to kill off bindweed, but it didn't look very dead.