At last the snow has gone and the garden has returned to normal. Following a week of suspended animation, both the plants and gardeners are making up for the growing time that we lost. Green shoots are appearing everywhere and it is almost as if the big freeze gave our plants a boost; certainly the spring sunshine and warmer temperatures of the past few days have helped spur on new growth.
In the Kitchen Garden we are catching up with the seed sowing. Outside we are sowing parsnips, leeks, beetroot and spinach in raised beds and mangers. We are still experiencing some sharp overnight frosts so we will be covering the sowings with fleece and cloches to encourage germination.
Inside the greenhouse we held off transferring seedlings to the cold frame whilst we had snow. We have young plants of broccoli, sprouts and shallots that can now be placed in the cold frame for a couple of weeks before they are planted outside. This, in turn, will free up space on our greenhouse staging to transfer established seedlings from the heated propagator, such as celery, celeriac and melon. These are very tender so they will be treated to a spot close to the greenhouse heater to keep them toasty. 
This will leave vacant spot in the heated propagator to finally get our tomatoes underway. We are sowing these later than we normally would, but this seems to be a theme for 2018 thus far. We are late sowing our parsnips and leeks outside and late transferring plants to the cold frame, compared to previous years. Hopefully we will be treated to a warm, sunny spring with frequent overnight showers to help everything catch up!
