2008 Garden Bloggers' Carnival

It’s carnival time – the period of feasting and fun preceding the forty days preceding Lent. The word carnival comes from the Latin – carne vale. Or in other words, Meat, goodbye ! Eat everything up quick, because from now until Easter it’s fasting and abstinence. Well - if you’re a Christian anyway. But I have to admit something. Lent may have started for you and carnival may be over – but for us in Milan, it hasn’t and isn’t. We carry on till Saturday.

The tradition dates back till 1485 when Milan was hit by an attack of the plague. For weeks the gates of the city were closed, no-one being allowed in or out – with obvious repercussions on the food supply. The epidemic passed and the city was reopened on Ash Wednesday - just when the already half-starved people should have been starting to fast. So the Archbishop of Milan asked the Pope for a special dispensation, and Milan was granted four extra days of carnevale. Somehow in the following years it never got changed back again ...

And so the Garden Bloggers’ Carnival starts today and will go on till Saturday. If you remember, I asked people to say thank you to the writers of blogs they’d particularly enjoyed by nominating one of their posts. So here we go with a chance to gorge yourself on some of the best posts from the gardening blog world...

One of the reasons I like organising these carnivals, is because I get to find out about blogs I’ve never heard of before. That happened when Kris of Blithewold nominated an post from Ledge and Gardens talking about garden design. The post nominated is about shape and plant choice, but when I went in to check that it was OK to post the link, what did I find but another post on the same topic – but this time dealing with colour. And what colour. If I was half so gifted visually, I’d have the best balcony in Southern Europe. Not to mention the superb condition of the plants. Oh well, back to fighting the red spider mite ...

Not all the posts nominated are new though. Sometimes one comes in which I’ve read and enjoyed before, and I’m grateful that someone has jogged my memory and sent me back to it – as happened when Carol of May Dreams Gardens nominated this post by Annie in Austin. It’s about mowing lawns, and makes a great case for doing it yourself rather than (I admit, like me when I’m in London) delegating it to some hapless member of your family. I conned my son for a year or so by looking grave and saying “Do you think you can do it OK?” in that “Mummy” tone which really means “I don’t think you’re old enough”. But once the novelty wore off and he got a bit bigger, he twigged. So then it was an appeal to my husband - Darling I’m so tired and I really must get on with deadheading the roses ... Annie thinks otherwise, and once she starts talking about her Dad, she’s got me convinced. Odd how so many of us women garden bloggers trace our love of gardening back to our dads.

Kris showed that she’s open minded about lawns though, by also nominating Blackswamp Girl who ripped out her front lawn to plant other things. In Britain where we have fences and hedges around the front garden, lawn or flowers are a matter of personal choice, but in the States where everything is open and the space between the houses and the roads therefore feels more communal, it seems to be a different matter. At the moment my house has a lawn at the front – but I suspect that if I actually lived there it wouldn’t last long. Why waste gardening space when I’m never going to sit there? The lawn is for the back. I start tut tutting when people pave the whole front garden over to park their cars there, but if I saw one of my neighbours had created the same front garden as Blackswamp Girl, I’d be envious.

That's enough for Day 1 - enjoy. But the carnival will be back on Thursday, and again on Saturday with more. So if you've been intending to send in a nomination but haven't got round to it - there's still time! See you on Thursday!

Acknowledgement

Thanks for the photo, provided under Creative Commons License via flickr.

To-Do List Day : February

I have a ritual at the beginning of every month. I grab my copy of the Reader's Digest The Gardening Year and spend a while poring over the section for that month to see what I should be thinking about doing. I have to adjust a bit as it's based on temperature conditions in Britain, so I generally have to check out the following month too. The official average temperatures for the month are minimum O° and maximum 8°C (approx 47°F), but this winter and last have been so mild that the real temperatures have been considerably higher. I wonder though if I wouldn't have to make changes even if I were in Britain. My copy of the book was inherited from my Dad, and it dates back to 1972. Given the climate changes there have been since then, I suspect a more recent edition might tell a quite different story. Checking on Amazon it's now called New Gardening Year and is a much glossier affair than the sober text I have. Does anyone have one? It would be fun to swap photocopies of a few pages to see what the differences are.

In any case, it's been really mild this year, even for here. No sign of the Giorni del Merlo, supposedly the coldest days of the year. Last weekend we reached 14°C (about 57°F), only a degree short of the January record. And it's sooo tempting. Could I get a few seeds in and get a headstart this year? But a look at the forecast for this week dashes all hopes - we're going to have an average of 4-5 degrees, and it'll drop to 1 degree some nights. What was I saying about exceptionally mild weather? Forget it.

So what could I be doing? It's certainly time to start clearing up, and that's probably going to take me a while. There's dead stuff in quite a lot of the containers which needs yanking out, and those that I can empty completely will need washing out and disinfecting to make sure that any fungus or virus diseases don't get carried over to this year's plants. Those containers which I can't empty will need at least a partial soil change.

I also want to move a few things. Remember my stunted hollyhocks? They made it through the winter with no problems, and today I moved them to the container on the front balcony where the previous year's hollyhocks had done so well. I suspect the problem was a mixture of late sowing and wrong position, so we'll see if they come on better this year. Other things just need routine repotting.

And then there's the balcony itself. The railings need a good wash before I put the containers back, as do the little tables and shelving which the inside containers sit on. Not my favourite job.

The Gardening Year doesn't suggest there's much I should be doing this month - it seems to concentrate on treating lawns, cutting hedges and pruning fruit trees. But it does also say it's time to prune the plumbago. I'm a bit shall I, shan't I about that. I usually do, but I have a neighbour who clearly doesn't and hers always blooms much earlier than mine. Mine then catches up, but as I'm often not here in July and August, it means I miss the best of it. Maybe I'll leave it this year.

TGY does tell me that I can get my tomatoes sown this month, if I can keep them at16°. I hope that means 16° or more, because they'll have to be in the house where the temperature is higher. But I'll give it a go. That will be the first step in this year's attempt to create a kitchen garden on one of the balconies - and having never grown vegetables in my life, it's a whole new ball game. More about that in future posts, but expect frequent appeals for advice.

But if it does stay mild, by the end of the month I shall certainly be thinking about chrysanthemum cuttings. I saw today that the new growth is shooting up, and I don't want to leave it too late. A bit of warm weather and a position backing onto a radiator and they should be OK.

What about you? What's on your To do list for this month? I shall be posting on mine at the beginning of each month this year, so if you'd like to join in just post and leave a comment here so that we can find you.

Oh - and don't forget the Garden Bloggers' Carnival. It starts Tuesday, so you're still in time to send in a nomination!