April

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages...
_{The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer}

April is a very exciting month. Winter, the season of impatient anticipation, dragging its heels like the thief of happiness in a tussle with a clumsy but ultimately victorious police sergeant, is on its way out. Chaucer had it right, I think, and Walt Disney wasn't far wrong either.


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The excitement of April is gloriously evident in the garden, as everything is literally budding with promise and potential. Swelled by sun and gradually increasing daylight hours, the world is thinking about being verdant, presaging the lush and floral month of May with the tender and tentative signs of first growth.




It's time to sow the bulk of summer crops, the sort of things which grow while you watch. My borlotti and french beans - soaked overnight, sowed in good compost and kept in the warm - were already piercing the surface within five days and perceptibly bursting out and straining upwards by the hour.

It's also time to build on your keenness of earlier months and prick out onions, tomatoes, and whatever else you thought you were mad enough to sow in the wet months of winter.

Nothing beats the taste of homegrown tomatoes; eating them properly ripe makes your realise what a poor excuse shop bought tomatoes are. OK, the artificial preservation/unripening of shop bought tomatoes (which certainly have more food miles than seeds) means that we can 'enjoy' tomatoes from January through to, well, January. But in securing year-round supplies of toms, shops compromise so much in flavour.

I'm growing beef tomatoes this year, which I'm pretty excited about. You can pay up to a pound per tomato for beef varieties in the shops, which can make a round of stuffed toms fairly pricey. So I'm looking forward to being quids-in with these beasties.

I potted them up the other day and revelled in that bizarrely seductive smell of bruised tomato stems. (Tomatoes are in the blood. My great grandad was a nurseryman on Guernsey before the war; his family, including my Nan, were evacuated; he survived Nazi occupation by growing greenhouse tomatoes.)

Some things are a slower burn. My dad and I went to a local nursery last autumn, and ate all the blackcurrants off a bush there and then. They were perfectly ripe, warm from the sun, and had only a slight hint of pesticide. Out of guilt and gluttony, or intoxicated by a lethal mix of vitamin C and noxious chemicals, we bought a bush. I pruned it back once the leaves had fallen, and took all of the prunings as cuttings.




There's an odd thrill as you watch a cutting take root. At times, its future hangs in the balance; it could rot from the soil upwards - or flourish with lush green leaves.




April is a time to take stock, too. So far, it is proving that the preparation - the pruning, dismantling of fences, scrubbing of greenhouse panes in soggy latex gloves, the weeding and digging of sodden soil in the cold light of January - has been worth it after all.