I agree Paul
What really concerns me is the lack of frosts.
Many of our indigenous plants need a bite of frost to kickstart them into growth. Similarly knowing our latest frost dates can help us with our planting out times and consequently our sowing times.
For the last few years I have been monitoring my spring bulbs to correlate their appearance with my sowing and planting times as opposed to reading books written by some very notable people on when to sow/plant etc.
As a rule of thumb to date, I find that when my snowdrops appear I can start some things e.g taking cutting ofChrysanthemum & Dahlia and perhaps sow my planned early sowings e.g. onions.
When the crocus flower I start sowing some perennials or take cuttings
When the Dafodils flower this is when I really get into gear with my sowing/taking cuttings,and pricking out.
When the Tulips flower come into flower I often sow root crops which wil be protected by the soil coving until germination.
When the Daffodils die back* I start my planting out.
* This has been a bit of a disaster for the last 3-4 years due to the die back, which would normally take around 6 weeks from flowering to around two or three weeks which is far too short a period as it does not give the bulbs time to replenish themselves for the following year. This results in much fewer flowers and lots more blind plants the following year.
My website timings are now getting a bit of kilter as it is a compilation of my diary data that I have kept from the seventies when we did get dryer frosty winter weather.
One of the reasons. I did this bit of research is; my website is an almanac and as such a form of calendar! But plants do not work to calendar whereas we do, hence me trying to work with nature.
What I do at the beginning of each year is I note what is happening in the garden then look for a similar event on my website and note the week number then I +/ - that number on my calendar to see if the event is earlier/ later then work from there.
It is then I make a mental note to adjust the website times I will be using that season by the resultant difference for the rest of the season.
Note:Some seasons I do this more than once if only to see if the season is picking up earlier or later.
Isn't this 'global warming' a pain?
I hope. I haven't bored you all too much but this out of kilter weather is keeping from getting on with something out in the garden because it was frosty overnight and sleeting at the moment.
Hope you all have good gardening year Tg
