Spring springing.

We've made good use of the beautiful weather in the last days and got the garden partly cleaned up for spring. The bushes and shrubs are all pruned, most of the leaves have been removed from the beds under the willow fence, and I've started clearing out unwanted things from under the raspberries. There will be need for fertiliser at quite a few places, and there's still a chunk of work left to do, but it begins to look a lot like Chrisma - no, spring, of course.

The neighbour's bees are also stopping by occasionally, and he's told us that all his hives have survived the winter. We've also seen at least one bumblebee queen - the white-arsed variety, probably Bombus Terrestris.

There has also been some spring cleaning in the wintergarden... and there, unfortunately, losses were quite considerable. The lemon tree and the two physalis plants made it fine. Of the three Ecuador Purple chili plants, one survived, one is dead, and on the third jury's still out, but it's not looking good.

[caption id="attachment_5878" align="alignnone" width="159"] The Ecuador Purple sprouting again!


I also suspect that the tomatoes are a complete and resounding nope... which is a pity, because they are so much earlier when you get them to survive the winter. Ah well.

The smaller of my dwarf pepper plants also survived, without even shedding its leaves:



The other, large one, is probably dead too. As are all my coffee plants. There's some avocado trees still growing happily - but of the Marconi Red pepper plants, none seem to have made it. I'm not sure if one or two of the noname spice rack chilis have survived, but most of these are crunchy as well.

On the positive side, all three of the Bishop's Hat pepper plants did survive, and are working hard on new leaves right now:



We got those seeds because the fruits look quite weirdly funny.



These are recently harvested, by the way, so they are from last year. And they are tasty as well!

So this year will see a lot of new, young tomato plants. And then, who knows, some of them might actually make it into the next year...