The new herbs are in – sage, rosemary, oregano, thyme, winter savory and lemon thyme. They are too small to make much impact yet, but they seem to be settling in well, and the current good weather is certainly helping. The chives are flourishing, lemon balm is coming through, and the sorrel plants are beginning to recover from their rough handling. All the seeds I sowed two weeks ago are up, apart from parsley (well, it does have to go seven times down to hell before it comes up) and mollucella laevis, which isn’t doing a thing.

The knot garden is beginning to green up, but nothing shows up on a photograph yet, so I’ll wait a week or two and try again. Some of the other herbs are doing well –

Pots which were in the greenhouse now have lots of new shoots.

\the violets in the stock bed seem to like the richer soil here.

I’ve had my first flowers on the wind anemones under the birch tree. The next step will be to sow seeds outside – chervil, marigolds, poppies. Rain is forecast over the weekend, so that will be a job for tomorrow.

The frogspawn has gone from the full stop stage to the comma, as the tadpoles grow, and the hedges are full of sparrows and blackbirds building nests. I can hear starlings, great tits, wrens and chaffinches singing most days, and yesterday for the first time this year, I heard skylarks.  They must be in the fields at the end of the village, but their song pours into my garden like rain. Fabulous.