Mad March

The weather last week was crazy. As forecast (see the Saturday post) it snowed. Not a lot here, but in areas not far from Milan, people were snowed in, and in the mountains they had record low temperatures for March : around -20°C (-4°F) if I remember correctly.

It didn't last long. A couple of days and we were back to bright blue skies and sunshine. But the temperatures have remained very, very strange. Yesterday it was 14°C (57°F) on the balcony at lunchtime. With -2°C (28°F) forecast for the night. Today it's been 16°C (61°F) but will drop to 1°C (33°F) tonight. That's a huge difference andI think I'm going to have some very confused plants.

It's also meant that I've been holding back on sowing. Though one set of seedlings doesn't seem to have been at all phased by the cold weather. This winter, I made the mistake of leaving my chrysanthemum container underneath the bird feeder. It seems that this year I'm going to be harvesting a great crop of millet ...