SPRING is galloping on. It’s now the second week of May, the week in the year when gardeners in the cold Midlands, where I live, wonder whether the danger of night frosts has passed or if one morning they’ll find the potato shoots have blackened and that they planted out the French bean seedlings a few days too early. 

SPRING in Ireland is not like spring anywhere else in the world. Because of our position out in the Atlantic at a latitude of over 50 degrees north it arrives late and in a rush.

I was at the wheel of my boat, steering round a bend in the river. A small island appeared up ahead with a couple of willow trees and an odd object on its shoreline — a brown mound capped with white, like an enormous bun with icing on it. 

In the frosty part of the Midlands where I live you have to plant your potatoes quite late. I have learnt to wait until April is well established.

Winter really hung on this year. Where I live we had snow at the beginning of March. I wisely proclaimed, to anyone who’d listen, that if March comes in like a lion it will go out like a lamb. Wrong again. It went out with bitter north-westerly winds and rain.

THERE is a strange and extremely unscientific prejudice embedded in the heart of the environmental movement. It is the prejudice against what are usually described, in distinctly emotive terms, as ‘alien invasive species’, writes Dick Warner

My boat is moored in Ballinasloe, on the River Suck, and about a week ago I was sitting on deck, soaking up the spring sunshine, when a wild and beautiful sound made me look up into the sky.

FISHING seasons, unlike shooting seasons, are not the same everywhere, they vary from catchment to catchment, writes Dick Warner.

I’m told that a bittern has been heard booming in north Co Leitrim. 

I got a phonecall the other day from a friend with a problem, writes Dick Warner. In the past few weeks deer had started invading her garden and doing a lot of damage.