While it has been bitterly cold, the weather has been sunny during the day and around lunchtime it's warm enough to get out and do stuff. So I have tidied up my pots around the house, removing the autumn leaves which swirled around them and which I didn't get around to clearing before the snow (the leaves and spare soil go on the beds).I moved my pots around, so I now have snowdrops and primroses on the windowsills, with daffodils waiting in the wings.
The final job around the house is to tidy up my rambling rose (New Dawn), which grows over the door as you can see. It's not a big job, as I prune it properly in late summer, here's why. Rambling roses grow their flowers on horizontal shoots, so you need to have them grow sufficiently for the next year's blooms, and tied in (roughly, in my case, as you can see!) before the new season. The rose also grows on the windy side of the house, so a good prune before the autumn gales means less damage. So at this time of the year, all I need to do is cut off errant or unwanted stems and re-tie/weave in branches which have broken free over the winter. Next week I'll give it a good feed (potato fertiliser, which it seems to like) to bring on the growth. The rose looks straggly at the moment, with bits of ugly string showing, but in 6 weeks time none of that will be visible.
