It’s still raining!

With the risk of repeating myself – it is still raining and it is a weeks since my last post where I was moaning a bit about the rain, although grateful enough that I didn’t have to water my parched garden, but enough is enough! Since Thursday the 5th April it has rained EVERY day. Not bucketing down all the time, and not all through the day, but we have had rain every day at some point either during the day, evening or night. And it is still raining.

The forecast is just as dismal as last week was, although we are going to get perhaps two days without rain next week...perhaps...and apparently it will be a brief spell of warmer weather at the start of the week before we are back to 12 degrees again. Here is the UK weather warning for tomorrow: An area of heavy rain and strong winds will spread northwards across the southern half of the UK on Sunday. The public should be aware that this may lead to some local flooding given the recent wet conditions, and that northeasterly winds may exceed 50 mph in some locations, bringing the risk of falling trees. Yeah...just lovely! The wind is howling outside right now, so it has started already. All this cold weather and rain has made a huge difference to my garden compared to last spring. Here is my garden today, when I braved the downpour for a brief moment and went out to take this picture. I didn’t dare take any close-ups as my camera is not waterproof, so this is the only picture you get from today! My rhododendron Dopey has yet to open a single flower, no roses yet to open although there are buds, the alliums are on their way up, but none has yet to flower. My lilies are barely sticking out of ground.

But compare it with this picture from 1st May last year; what a difference! I had lots of roses already flowering, my rhododendron was in full flower, the alliums were up and flowering, the dregea on the arch had lots of leaves already and look at the pot in the foreground with strawberries; lots of flowers and some white berries already. This year my strawberries haven’t even started producing any flowers yet! (Although you can’t see the tub in the shot above as I have moved the tub around the corner.) There were lots of lilies well out of ground and some were starting to flower and what you can’t see in this picture is all the Lily of the Valley that had been flowering for a while.

Everything is rather late now, so much for a relatively warm winter....my garden needs lots of warm sunshine and so do I too! I haven’t been outside in my garden the whole week and I am getting serious gardening abstinence symptoms - yesterday I even tidied up my kitchen cupboards out of sheer frustration! This rain is doing a lot of good for our empty water storage, but I have had enough, let’s have some sunshine, please! Until next time, and hopefully with some nicer photos for you, take care :-)