Saying goodbye to the winter

After it snowed on 11th, 16th and 21-22nd of March and we got about 30 cm of snow total, weather suddenly turned to sunshine and warmth. Yesterday an unseasonably warm wind from the south started high speed melting and today the daytime temps passed 15C which is pretty much tshirt weather!

Water is running everywhere, our micro swales captured most of it, even if the rain gutter drainage couldn't cope and overflowed a bit... spring seems very close now! I do hope the trees would wait for another week or two before blooming, however!

Two days ago:

And today that's all melted and those bloomed:

The bees did not miss a single hour, they immediately found the newly open flowers and started foraging.

The sudden warm spell prompted us to prepare and load our seed starting bed. That's a single bed frame that someone threw away because it was ripped apart - nothing a few screws cannot fix!

So I shoveled about 400 liters of soil into it (left from a massive dig in late autumn, but more about that in another post). Then i covered it with 2 cm of our starting mix - fine compost, sieved soil, peat moss, perlite, sand.

Then I marked 20 sections and we selected 20 types of seeds and I sprinkled each of them liberally. It's great to have your own collected seeds - you don't have to be stingy and save every last seed! I love it that it allows me to be abundant with the sowing!

After that there was about 1 cm of the mix on top, firmly pressed and then watered thoroughly with one of those water pulverizer pump bottles. Then row cover, 2 layers, then a plastic layer.

We'll see how it goes. That's the earliest we've started a seed bed ever, but then again, the location is better - south of the house, sheltered, much warmer than the garden. Strictly zone 0, perma-speaking. Under constant observation and maintenance!

At the end of the day we visited friends in the village so the wives can chat, the kids can play and I can do a quick 1:1 grafting lesson. No photos of that sadly, so maybe next time!