The cold spell here seems to be over, at least for now - we've had rain today, washing away all the snow. Now the snowdrops are visible again:



as are the first crocus blossoms. Not open yet, but soon.



It's really nice to have these first heralds of spring coming out! It also reminds me that it's about time to start the tomato and chili and pepper seedlings...

There were heavy snowfalls in Germany yesterday, and there was a little more snow also today, and it's rather cold outside at the moment with the prediction of even lower temperatures during the next few days.

The snow that came down turned everything here into a winter wonderland - it looks really, really pretty!



There's little heaps or cockscombs of snow on every twig and branch. Of course, there's also snow on every willow withy that has not been cut yet:



and it will need to get warmer again before we can continue harvesting; it should be above 0°C for the cutting. For now, though, we enjoy the funny contrast between the cut and the uncut bits, both looking very nice:



Thank goodness we're living in an area that is getting snow regularly and so the logistics are in place to cope, as in there's vehicles to clear the streets. People also tend to know how to drive a car in wintery conditions. We cycled to our milk dispenser yesterday, to get milk, eggs, and a few (blue) potatoes, and there were a few spots on the way where we were really glad about our studded tyres. With those and appropriate clothes, winter cycling really is fun, even if it takes a bit longer and is rather more strenuous in snow and on ice than on clear roads.

Traffic-wise, things are not looking so good in some other parts of Germany, where the snowfall has led to delays or cancellation of public transport, and to some spectacularly bad traffic jam, with people trapped in their cars for hours.

The reason for the cold spell, by the way, is air from the polar zones coming down south... which is linked to global warming. Changes in overall temperature lead to changes in the polar vortices, which are air currents around the pole, which means the cold air isn't contained there anymore, and thus comes to visit... so having winters with hard cold spells is just the opposite of what one would suspect at first glance.

Well. At least the snow we're getting out of this right now is pretty.

 

It's the time of year again - our willow fence has to be pruned. Willow harvest!

I find it absolutely amazing each year to see how much biomass this fence pushes out; and each year there's more of the really thick ones. I'd say withies, but they are more like little trees themselves!

We got started with the cutting yesterday, and as usual, it will take us a while and a few sessions to get through the whole fence. There is definitely a difference visible already, though:



You can see where we got started on the left side. We're always cutting the fence in several (many!) sessions, as there are still some places where the basic structure is not established completely, and it takes some concentration to not cut the wrong bits off. Especially the lower arches are prone to losses, and it's very easy to cut off all possible replacement shoots before realising that one would have been needed to close the gap... It's also still rather nippy in February, and cold hands do not work so well.

When we planted the fence, we made sure to choose a willow variant that is suitable for basketry, but some of them are also used for willowing wool (as in beating it to fluffiness) - and some will become distaffs. Such as these nice, straight, rather sturdy ones:



They are really long - and rather thick at the bottom end, as you can see here with my trusty measurement fingers:



My index and middle finger side by side are exactly 3 cm wide. That has come in handy so many times!

On that note: If you are ever in the need of figuring out how long or wide something is - and who isn't - it is totally worth it to play around with a ruler and figure out how wide your fingers in various combinations are. I get 3, 5, and approximately 1 cm with my fingers, plus an approximately 20 cm with my hand fully spanned out, and there's a lot of measurement questions that can be covered with these units.

I've posted before about the slightly weird chili plants that I have this year. They are still alive, and faring fairly well, even though it has gotten quite cold now. We don't heat the winter garden, so it's below 10° C in there now, and can drop down to about 3-4 ° C. That is approximately the lowest temperature that tomato plants will endure, and chilis don't like it much colder either, so there is not much growing or blooming going on there right now. With one exception - my physalis plant is flowering; it starts in autumn or early winter, and goes on flowering basically all through winter here.



With the chilis, there is slow but steady ripening of the fruits. Which means interesting colour changes in the interesting chilis:



They will eventually turn all red, but at the moment, I am totally enjoying this multi-coloured effect.

There's still some activity other than slow ripening, by the way - one stalwart fly is living in the winter garden and visits the flowers when it's sunny and thus a bit warmer. And something else is apparently also active, as evidenced by this:



Chili plant leaves, it seems, are tasty for someone!

While I'm at the (winter-)garden pictures - here's some more:



This, according to the seed packet, is a "Tenessee Teardrop" chili plant. It's also supposed to have these light fruits, at least at the start. They should turn proper yellow later, then purple, then orange and finally red as they ripen. I'm looking forward to that. (And yes, I have a thing for chili peppers that have purple or violet fruits at some stage. Or black - black is fine with me, too.)

And it's now the time of the year that the physalis plant is starting to flower:



The plant is several years old now, and it stayed in its pot in the wintergarden all this year. It could theoretically move outside during summer, but I was too lazy to lug out the heavy pot with a very long plant support in it, and then lug it back in again.

The plant needs quite a lot of water, and will grow much better with regular doses of some kind of plant food, but otherwise it's rather uncomplicated. Apart from needing some support that you tie the very long stems to, that is. I prune it back vigorously after all the fruits have been harvested; that's usually the case in late spring or early summer. Flowers start again in autumn, when it's getting colder outside. The fruits stay smaller than those you can buy in the supermarket (though with enough water and fertiliser, they do get bigger than without). There's lots of them, though, and no transport for them - if you don't count the very short way from off the plant and straight into me!

I've blogged before about my chili pepper plant shenanigans - after sadly killing off all my Ecuador Purple chili plants, I tried to grow new ones from my seeds, but alas, they were too old and didn't germinate anymore.

So I threw seeds from a spice jar into soil. They were taken from my own chilis, so there would have been a chance of them being Ecuador Purple, but I had no luck there. In parallel, because I wanted to make sure, I mail ordered some chili seeds, and some tomato seeds while I was at it. Those, obviously, included Ecuador Purple seeds.

Well. The spice jar plants all have rather similar upright, slender, pointed peppers in a boring green, maybe with a hint of black in one or two plants. Some have a curved fruit here and there. Altogether... rather boring; I'd have expected some more variation, because they were taken from different plants that, by all rights, should not have been true-to-seed (yet). Anyways, one of them at least now has produced a single fruit that is sort of dancing out of line:



Possibly that is an effect of cross-pollination; our place and the chili plants were definitely well-visited by insects working hard to pollinate. If it is, the same effect may be the reason why this oddly-shaped fruit is growing on an Ecuador Purple plant:



This is definitely not the shape you'd expect it to be. However, I suspect that the guy I bought the seeds from does not grow his plants well-separated from each other. There was a lot of variation between the individual pepper and tomato plants regarding their size and growth shape. One of the tomatoes and several of the pepper plants were also very far away from the breed description.

Also, there's this, which is also supposed to be an Ecuador Purple chili:



The plant has several of these weird winged fruits.

I don't mind too much, since I mostly want the chilis for their decorative value, and that is certainly quite decorative - but if I had wanted 'proper' breed seeds, I'd certainly be very disappointed. I am a bit disappointed about the tomato seeds, in that regard. I'm also not really happy with the germination quota (which was not very good - and yes, I note down how many seeds I stick into the soil, and how many plants come out). So I'll definitely not order seeds there again.

What I will do, though, is grow plants from those odd fruits, and see if anything even odder will come out!

What you see on this picture is my current little bit of fun. Actually, it's not really very current - this has been going on for a while: I'm trying to grow caged distaffs.

This is a willow bush, and since willow grows fairly fast and makes new branches from where it's cut, I thought that maybe it might be possible to grow shoots with enough smaller branches at the top to form a cage.



Jury's still out on whether it will work or not, and on how long it will take to grow a distaff once I know how best to do the pruning and forming, but there is some progress on some of the shoots.



Forming the top part will be the next interesting step...