Happy New Year! Yes I know I didn’t do a blog post in December. I didn’t forget, I was just trying to stay warm as it was pretty cold most of time. The ramp gets extremely slippery in the freezing weather and we have been having a lot of freezing temperatures lately so I haven’t been in the garden for ages. I don’t fancy getting stranded in the freezing cold just because I can’t make it up the ramp due to ice. I have been putting fleece over the plants in the conservatory plus keeping an oil radiator on during the night to try and keep the room around 5o C or more. When there is an occasional glimpse of sunshine I remove the fleece.
Harry has been keeping a couple of areas in the frozen pond melted so the gas does not build up under the ice. Some people keep a small ball on the pond and say that it prevents the pond from icing over completely but that has never worked for us. Plus I don’t want the dog jumping in to try and retrieve it! All the slabs are very icy.
I have been keeping the birds fed and changing their water on the patio. When one birdbath freezes I put out a fresh one and defrost the frozen one. The pots are all defrosting now as the temperature has started to rise a little. I am so looking froward to spring and feeling a bit of warm sunshine and seeing the garden come back into colour. I am grateful for all the evergreens so I am not just looking at bare brown twigs, and soon there will be flowers on a few late winter flowering shrubs but we are just a little too early for them yet.
Even the patio slabs are slippery so I still have to be careful. At least we haven’t had the snow that a lot of other folk have been having (so far). I remember the Beast from the East when I had to clear the snow from the patio almost every hour to keep a path clear to the bird feeder (with Harry’s help). Eventually I couldn’t even open the door to do that. I was stuck indoors for ages. Edinburgh is reasonably well sheltered from a lot of extreme weather so we don’t do badly really I just don’t do well in the cold.