Brown Envelopes

I always forget how much I like February. It's the weirdest word too, with that little r that skulks around in there, presumably Up To No Good. The name February comes from the Latin februum (purification) & the Roman festival of februa or Ritual Purification (which became part of the Lupercalia festival, which was the same sort of thing, but with more nudity & whacking people with thongs).
But February is the month where you start to feel the wheel of the year turning again. The long nights are coming to an end, and the weather is starting to warm up. The electric blanket & hot water bottles are being folded up & packed away until Autumn.
February is also the month when you can actually start opening packets of seeds (mostly tomatoes, chillis, peppers & aubergines, which get sown into seed trays of fine compost & tucked up in a heated propagator, or wrapped in plastic & put on the shelf in the boiler room). And potatoes start appearing in the garden centres & shops, all ready for chitting (there's more spud info in one of my old posts here).

It's the month where the earth seems to be holding her breath & taking it all in, the long year ahead, the first green shoots poking out of the earth to the ripe fruits hanging heavy on the boughs.
Holding her breath & taking it all in, in the moments before it all begins.
And I am holding my breath too. A little impatient, a little restless, waiting for all the world to be green again.

So I pack up seeds in brown envelopes, and give them to anyone who'll have them. Because brown envelopes usually only contain bad news & bills.


So if you want a brown envelope, post a comment (and if there's anything you can't grow, or you don't have much space for growing, let me know, or you'll probably end up with some sort of Jurassic kale of monstrous sunflower. If you want a surprise, or you'd like something in particular (y'know, courgette, wildflowers etc) say so. It never hurts to ask. If you're too shy to post, you can send me an email instead.