It is probably a good thing that I don’t do “New Year Resolutions”! If I did they would be along the lines of; draw every day, use the camera often, eat well, exercise more, update all my blogs and websites.  By now – 2 weeks into January I would have failed on every front.

January and I are not friends. At the start of every new year I turn into an apathetic blob and can hardly drag myself about the place. All my good intentions vanish into a blue funk.

The last few days however, despite the freezing nightime temperatures, (which to my mind are right and proper for January) we have had some golden days. Yesterday, Dobby, P. and Snowdrop dragged me out for walk along the “prom” in the glorious sunshine.

At the start of January we had gale-force winds that crumped the polytunnel and wiggled the fences but I didn’t realize how much sand the winds and the water had moved.

No – we are not walking on the beach, but alongside the road to the harbour in Barmouth – which has been closed because of the amount of sand that the elements have dumped on it.

Despite the wind – the garden has held up pretty well. I find it hard to get my head around the amount of things in flower after the mild start to the winter currently I have everything from snowdrops and hellebores to pelargoniums and salvias flowering at the same time. I have to wonder how the rest of the flowering year is going to pan out!

Since I started this blog I have had 10,784 spam comments.  While Akismet is brilliant at stopping these spam comments from ever reaching a published page, I do have to glace through them just to make sure that a “real” person has not slipped through the net. There have only been 15 that have slipped though the net since October 2008 – for some reason a couple of years ago my spam prevention decided that Easygardener was a spammer and had a period of a few months where I had to retrieve all her comments. But wading through a pile of Spam comments “just in case” every evening is not my idea of fun so I have added a Maths question to the bottom of the comment form. I am sorry for the inconvenience that this might cause you – and I do hope that it will not stop you from leaving comments …. I also wonder if it works! Please let me know if you have any problems.

It was on this day 4 years ago that I started a “Garden blog” in January 2008. I moved to my current home here in October 2008. I would like to thank you for the 6.5 thousand comments that you have shared over the past 4 years and well over a hundred thousand pages views … You rock!