Birthday cake and sea buckthorn

 I got back from work on my birthday to find our traditional birthday banner up, presents wrapped in charity shop headscarves I keep in my wrapping stash ('Look Mum, no paper!') and this amazing cake that my eldest daughter made. With her arm in a cast. It's a carrot cake, one of my favourites but grating the carrots always feels like a hassle so I rarely make it. It's decorated with pumpkin seeds, orange zest that she candied, rocket flowers and primulas which she had a sudden panic about and wrapped the stems in foil in case they weren't edible! (I'm always adding flowers to food but they don't always take much notice...) It was absolutely delicious. The presents included a new trowel and hand fork because I broke the handle on my old trowel the other day, a bag to keep them in, a print by a friend in the village I'd admired and the promise to visit my favourite cafe for lunch with my daughters.

delicious carrot cake

My friend's daughter made me a Hedgewitch's hat for my birthday!

Spring has definitely sprung here although the old adage March goes in like a lamb and out like a lion has proved true with some very un-springlike weather into April, but the trees are greening and the blossom is out so fingers crossed for a good harvest.

Cherry blossom

A hairy footed flower bee on pulmonaria, one of it's favourites

The weather has picked up again, my thermals are back in the wardrobe and I finally sorted out the fence at the bottom of the garden. Again. I tried a couple of years ago but it got swamped by weeds from the field again. This time we're going to keep the grass and brambles on the field side strimmed and I'm going to interplant the hedging plants with a ground cover that can stand up to the couchgrass, probably creeping comfrey.  A garden a few houses up has it and it seems to be working so I might go and beg a bit from them, perhaps in exchange for some eggs. It isn't a nutrient accumulator like common comfrey, symphytum officinale, but it will still benefit the compost heap if it gets too exuberant.

I channelled my inner Ray Mears and planted sea buckthorn. I has sea buckthorn ice cream on holiday in North Wales once and it's in my Top Two best ice creams along with the memory of a rose petal ice cream I had as a child in the Lake District.

The Castel Creamery in Harlech, seller of the fabled sea buckthorn ice cream

The one thing sea buckthorn doesn't like is being waterlogged so I'm slightly concerned because our garden gets pretty wet, but the spot they're in isn't the wettest and I've overplanted in anticipation so I think I just need to keep my fingers crossed. Somebody did point out that they prefer coastal positions and I'm about as far as you can get from the sea in England but I can grow sea kale and other plants that grow on or near beaches in the wild, so we'll see. All the plants cost me less than £20 and a morning's work so it's not a catastrophe if it doesn't work. 

The other gamble is that the plants are male and female and I'm not going to know which for a couple of years...

The rosa rugosa I was given by some friends when they were re-organising their garden and the buddleia ' Black Knight' I planted when we moved in  have survived the neglect, so we (well, Mr 13) strimmed and mowed around them and planted the sea buckthorn in between.

Once in I watered them well, covered around them with cardboard and then topped with old mushroom compost. I might need to add more potassium as they're nitrogen fixers so I'm saving banana skins at the moment.

I'll add more cardboard in front of them later

Obligatory photo bomb by Zak

The sheep are in the field now and are eyeing up the new plants

Next job is an asparagus bed for the special offer plants that have just arrived and then my pink fir apple potatoes are still sitting in eggboxes looking at me reproachfully so I guess that's the next day or so sorted. Good job it's the Easter holidays so no work for me!