New garden visitors

Its been a cold weekend but thankfully mostly dry after the snow fall on friday. Here is the snow on the war memorial in Greenhead Park.

To contrast here is the same place but on a recent winter afternoon.

So very different. I've not been able to make the most of the dry weather though really as I've been full of cold and feeling very lethargic. I'm just starting to feel better again today. Thankfully I had a day off today though and its been a gorgeous day, clear and sunny though still cold. But I've made a start on my seed sowing. Tomatoes and aubergines are on the propagator, I've sown celeriac, some lettuce, broad beans and leeks. For the cutting patch I've sown a few hardy annuals, some cornflowers, scabious and nigella. So nice to be back in the greenhouse and pottering. It feels more like spring every day.

I love watching my garden birds, there is a big flock of sparrows which visit each day, fighting and squabbling to get to the feeders, blue tits and coal tits, a robin, and a couple of blackbirds. A couple of bigger birds like magpies and pigeons come along every now and then but I've been excited this week by a couple of new visitors, and the two couldn't be more contrasting. One is a wren which I've seen flitting around the garden not actually on the feeders, such a lovely little bird. But the other was a bit of a shock, and perhaps not surprising that its found my garden because of the number of small garden birds and that is a handsome Sparrowhawk. The first time I saw it I think it just quickly flew through, but this week it was sat in the old apple tree. I did try and take a picture but I wasn't quick enough. I don't think it had anything this time but it looks like I'm inadvertantly also feeding him! The other new visitors I've had in my garden before but not for ages and that is a small flock of long tailed tits, I love these little pink, black and white balls of feathers with long tails. The joyous thing was watching them. They were flitting in and out of my two Japanese maple trees, these are leafless at the moment and so I could watch them easily. They looked like they were feeding on little insects along the branches, they were busy dangling upside down and in and out. Twittering away to each other the whole time. So happy for them to clear up any bugs on my plants.

In my previous blog post I mentioned a visit to Dunham Massey last week so I've added a few pictures from our walk here. Above are the snowdrops highlighting the white stem of the silver birches. Daffodils were the other star plant of the moment