I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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The Return of the Garden Spring is here, for certain values of spring. We've had frost several nights last week, but notwithstanding that, spring is making an effort to be seen. The garden is beginning to look green. I went out and took a turn around the garden to see what was what. The keyhole raised bed, which was a garden project about this time last year, had survived intact. Unsurprisingly - but happily! - the rosemary had come through the winter without much damage. Well, that's not completely accurate. One of the two shrubs sailed through without a scratch. The other had never quite recovered from the transplanting and pruning it received last year. It sent a runner out widdershins and that new shrub was going gangbusters, the parent fared less well. In fact, I gave it a gentle tug, and it came both loose and apart in my hands. Its carcass went into the compost conveniently located mere inches above. The surprise on this side is the rocket! Already it has come up to harvestable size, that's it in the front just off to the right in front of the rosemary runner. Both my wife and I were caught a little off-guard by just how quickly it has returned. Delighted, of course, and planning on making the first inroads on it this week to top our fish tacos. Round the other side, the main thing to see is the alliums. The chives are up nicely, which we anticipated, but also quite a few onions, both red and yellow, survived and are looking nice, except on the mornings after a frost, when they look a bit cranky. They were coming up a bit too close together, so I pulled some of the bulbs apart and added a bit of compost from the bin at the bottom of the garden to give them something useful to work with; those are the bits of soil that are a different colour. The whole bed needs more compost, naturally, and that's scheduled for this week. I'm taking a day off work so that we can execute a suitably masked-and-distanced raid on the garden shops during off-peak hours. Also on this side you can see at the far left another slight surprise - the tarragon. The tarragon was a replacement. Originally I think we had coriander in that spot, but whatever we had did not thrive. I put tarragon in sometime in the summer, and it's also started to do its thing. There are still a couple of gaps in the bed. Last year, they were filled with kale and brusselsprouts, but this year I've already built a separate bed against the new fence for the sprouts, and we plan to put kale into The Cunning Idea, or as we have taken to calling it, The Cathedral. As a result, we don't know what's going in there quite yet, but we'd best decide before the garden-shop raid. The Bee Berm is looking a little patchy, although much less so than when we started. When it was in its full glory last year, it was pretty, well, glorious, with hollyhocks rising high, and flowers blooming all over it. Already this year, the Old Soldier rosemary has flowered, and the lavender and heather are making their presence known. We may just leave it as it is, and see what 'volunteers' return this year to amuse and delight the bees. The Cathedral, as mentioned before, will be getting the kale this year. Of the two raspberry canes we planted, one took off like a rocket, or like 'the' rocket in the keyhold bed is doing, while the other one ... didn't. We're not going to worry too much about that, though. We'll put in tomatoes again. Most of the herbs seem to have come through all right, but we're on the fence about some of the flowers. It's another place were we need to make some decisisions soonish. We have so many delightful decisions yet to make. Next time, I'll tell you about the hedgehog! Luddite'sLog, 22 April 2021 © 2021 Jeff Berry

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