Garden at the beginning of March 2012

And actually taken on 1st March as well! Things are beginning to spring into life, and there is definitely much more greenery on display than at the beginning of February. The snow from four weeks ago only lasted a couple of days. And in comparison with March last year it looks a lot more, erm, organised!

We've had a few problems with squirrels. If you google how to stop squirrels eating bird food, one of the suggestions is to mix the food with chilli powder, which squirrels don't like. Except ours do. This is one of them eating chilli-covered mealworms from the ground feeder tray.

And they've also worked out how to climb up and over the arch hanging thing for the seed feeder and can hang upside down from it to get the seeds and nuts out. We did have a squirrel-proof (enclosed in a cage) feeder hanging there, but swopped them over in the colder weather as the slightly bigger birds like the robin couldn't get through to eat the seed. Now we've had to swop them back again and the robins are battling with the squirrels over the mealworms...

There have been some nice surprises too. This is a hellebore given to us by a neighbour last year, a self-seeded one from one of his plants. Apparently his plant's flowers are a dull muddy sort of colour and we were expecting something similar, but course, with seed, you never quite know what you're going to get, and this is what appeared instead!

 The primrose I grew from seed has come up a variety of colours. This one's my favourite:

 And the crocus are a nice variety too, again, I liked this one best!

 I needn't have worried about the snow ruining the camellia buds. We seem to be having a bumper year for them instead! At the bottom of this post is a picture of the slightly pathetic show we had last year. But I spent last year feeding it at the time when the buds were forming, and it's now minus the yew that was growing alongside, which seems to have helped too.

That's all for now. I have a slightly mad week involving a night in Cambridge for work and then a theatre trip with work that I signed up for before I realised it was straight after the trip to Cambridge (oops) so the next blog post might be a little delayed...