If Winter comes can Spring be far behind?

I am sitting in my office at home surrounded by seed potatoes. They are ‘chitting’! I have popped them into egg boxes, each one carefully labelled because I know from previous experience that they get muddled up and one potato looks very much like another, even if it is a red Desiree. They are laid out along the windowsills and across the floor where they catch the light and warmth of the sun. My son believes that I have finally lost it but as I pointed out they would not be in here if he hadn’t returned home after a stint of travelling and reoccupied his bedroom!

Hopefully, the potatoes will respond by sending out tiny grey, green shoots and if the weather changes dramatically by the end of the month I could be living dangerously and planting the first earlies out.  Living dangerously, because the smallest hint of frost will seriously damage the tubers and blacken any leaves foolish enough to raise their heads above ground. For the uninitiated, in the earthy world of potatoes, first earlies, as the name suggests, are the first potatoes planted in the spring. These are real ‘new’ potatoes. Forget the imposters from Egypt. Freshly dug from warm, dark soil they are mouth-watering gently boiled with a sprig of fresh mint and rolled in melted butter. I plant Arun Pilot and start lifting them about a hundred days after they have gone in.

Then come the second earlies. For the last two years I have planted Charlotte. Next come the tough guys; the main crop which, all being well, will provide potatoes all through next winter and into the early Spring. My choice? Cara, Pentland Crown and Desiree.

The potatoes wait. Outside darkness sits around the cottage. The windows are streaked with rain and the rising wind is slicing across the field from the west. It is wet but warm and it seems impossible that just over a week ago we had snow coming out of the east.

Despite the veil of wind and rain that lay across the sodden hills, January and February had carried a seed, a promise that the year had turned but early spring is a deceiver, a siren, calling from the depths of winter. Her beguiling smile tempts us with glimpses of good things to come as days lengthen and the sun, trapped in sheltered corners, feels warmer and the air carries a tingle of excitement.

Light had begun to creep under the window at six in the morning and the birds had started rehearsals for the dawn chorus. The rooks in the wood above the small holding had been adding daily to the number of untidy, large, dark nests that stand out against the bare branches of the ash trees. There were splashes of vivid yellow and purple where crocuses had lifted their heads through the grass. Tiny dark green buds appeared from nowhere on the elder and the lower branches of the elm that grows along the side of the road on our walk to work had broken into tight, soft, pale green buds. Toads were on the move.

St Valentine’s Day unfolded to the sound of a woodpecker booming close to the house and there was a perfect early-spring-warm evening when the dog and I walked home in daylight against the crimson of a sunset that threw its reflection across the eastern ridge of the Downs in front of us and turned the hills a soft pink in the fading sky.

But then fickle Spring turned her back, shook her hair, shrugged a cold shoulder and delivered snow. In a second the world ground to a halt as it vanished beneath a covering of white.

The snow had arrived overnight and by dawn the garden lay masked under a soft sprinkling of white and a flurry of tiny, icy flakes drifted across a dark, grey, heavy sky. The ground turned to iron, pipes froze and the wind chill factor took the temperature down to something that felt like minus three. The dog, from a long line of working Collies, refused to go out. His only excuse as far as I could see was that at three and a half this was the first snow he had seen. I donned another layer of clothing, coaxed the resisting canine outside, slide my way along the lane to the small holding, prayed locks would open, carried water, laid down extra straw in the poultry houses, cracked ice on water troughs, fed hay to the sheep and gritted the yard. This was real winter.

Peering out between hat and scarf, eyes stinging with the biting wind I could only wait for a rise in temperature, a thaw that would soften the ground, open up the water pipes again and uncover the grass for the sheep.

And sure enough, the world turned and having left a trail of disruption the snow disappeared overnight silently and swiftly as it had come.

Wind and rain have filled its place. The mud has returned. But maybe (with the optimism only a gardener processes) the rain will ease; the wind will dry the soil and in a few weeks’ time I can plant out the first of those potatoes.