The days are getting longer, daffodils, hyacinths and other lovely flowers are blooming, birds are twittering earlier in morning.

Ahh I'm positively poetical.

Hmm...I guess you're feeling a bit puzzled, (What on earth is she on about probably springs to mind).

One word,

Gardening...

Question

Have you been sat lazing about all winter well wrapped in your woolly sweater watching TV and studiously ignoring all those pathetic weeds in your flowerbeds? (I know I have)...

But sun starts shining, birds start singing, everything outside your window looks unbearably dreary, suddenly you're feeling energised and pangs of guilt become to much to bear...

Out comes spade and barrow, you start digging with gusto and...

You can't move next day (ouch)

Classic case of "Gardener's Back"

I've done it loads of times.

You have a couple of choices here, you can either let weeds in your garden take over your life, or you can be sensible about how you approach whole gardening thing.

Lets take a logical approach,

Does it really matter so much if you take a week to get your garden into a semblance of something approaching nice, Hey it's been choked in weeds all winter..

I grew up as a kid during WWII, and we always planted a “Victory Garden” in back yard, behind Rose hedge. It was a goodly sized plot of ground, probably 30 feet by 40 feet, and over years I became intimately acquainted with every spade full of dirt there.

Why? Well, because it was my job every spring from time I was old enough to step on a shovel and plunge it into ground to spade up that garden plot and ready it for planting. And I had to go into chicken coop and get chicken manure and spread it on ground and spade it in, also. I started doing this by about 1941, when I was 5.

And over by house there grew this veritable jungle of weeds. But, when you broke off a leaf and chewed it up it tasted pretty good. It was mint. Mint grows wild, in one form or another, pretty much everywhere. You may have some growing wild in your back yard right now? Some people call this an herb. I simply call it “food”. It’s something we learned to eat and enjoy. And I learned how, when walking through woods, to identify licorice root – a fern, usually growing on old dead trees – and enjoy chewing on it. Also probably classified as an herb, but I simply called it a “food”.

Every year Mom did canning. She would can tomatoes out of garden, carrots and peas out of garden. And she would can fruit for winter, some as whole fruit (peaches and pears – apples went into applesauce and apple jelly). She canned mostly in quart jars for foods, and in pint jars for jams and jellies. Apple jelly was special, though, canned in half-pint jars and it always had a leaf from wild mint in back yard on top of jelly in every jar. And sometimes, as a special treat, it might contain a piece of licorice root for flavor.