After an unusual but most welcome lovely warm week the next few days will bring us back to normality! The temperatures will be about 5C degrees lower than last week’s, that is for both night time and day time temperatures. We will be having some rain mostly in the mid-afternoons and a bit heavier for Thursday and Friday, we certainly can do with rain on our very dry soil!

Just as well I love being outdoors because I can always find something to do. This week, on my list, is to first go through the flower and shrub beds and weed them all for the final time before the foliage will cover the ground. The various bulbs are showing through so I should be able to avoid tramping on them!

The Hydrangeas and Fuchsias are showing signs of new shoots and by the end of the week I will be tempted to prune the Fuchsia down to 5-10 cm from the base and the Hydrangeas will get a more gentle prune back to a pair of leave buds.

There are still some young seedlings of Foxgloves to pot up as well as young Trilliums which will need some leaf mulch mixed into the compost for potting on. Then I must remember to water the young vegetable plants until they are ready to plant out.

Actually I am very glad that we have rain forecast, because it will prolong the flowering of the Tulip and Rhododendron flowers. I was going to give the latter a good watering but will now let nature do the job!