"What's a hipplecrip?" you may ask. In Derbyshire it's a tiny step made by putting one foot in front of the other, touching the heel of your leading foot against the toe of your back foot. And these are what have been taken today.
The exciting news was getting my first farmer's market stall confirmed and discovering #britishflowers on Twitter.
The feelings of delight on getting my stall have been followed by mild panic, wondering what will be ready in April and whether it will be enough - May onwards will be abundant, but the weather is such a tricky beast in the meantime it could have a real bearing on what is ready for the first stall.
So with new resolve, today I followed my newly drawn hosepipe line and chopped out more border space for future planting. Very satisfying. Large pile of cut turf now stacked, grass side down, underneath the pear tree, waiting to be recycled as top soil in 6 months time. I always seem to have one of these heaps accumulating somewhere in the garden...
Here's the path, where are the primroses?
Gone is the annoying patch of grass behind the tree. Revealed are the patches of rubble and old cherry tree root underlying bits of this border. Tomorrow, the tackling of these will be added to my jobs list. Along with getting serious compost, leaf mold and muck into the new border areas. And getting to the allotment to do some proper work next week. (Why are good intentions always so frequent where that place is concerned?)
In the garden at home, I can see glimmerings of white sheathed snowdrop buds appearing in the borders and the first tentacles of hellebore flower shoots are slowly probing their way out of the mud. But spring still seems such a way off with this muddy drabness all around. Hard to believe this will all change in the next six to eight weeks (an undending source of annual satisfaction). This is what I have to keep telling myself when I gulp at the thought of actually producing flowers to sell - things seem impossibly dead at the moment, but will not always be so.
I'm starting small, with one stall a month, just to see how things go and although my mind gets ahead of me with multiple markets and major flower undertakings, the reality is, thankfully, more modest. So I'll just have to bear this in mind, take deep breaths, pull on my boots, pray for good weather and set to work...
