All I want for Christmas this year is more time in the garden. Oh the pleasure that can be found in the idle pottering about of a summer evening, or the power harvesting of an autumn morning after the school run. I revert to childlike status, begging my family for “Just five more minutes” as […]
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The arrival of winter should surely herald hedgehog-like behaviour in all of us. We no longer shuttle too and fro from the kitchen garden to the house laden with gluts that we don’t know how to process fast enough, but rather wish to laze by the fire with a good book. Most flowers fade and […]
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We’ve spent an absolute fortune on topsoil and compost since we moved here. I’ve long intended to start making our own compost but it’s taken an age to get around to it. Our local council gave me a free 100 litre compost bin that I brought home to be smirked at by our gardeners. With […]
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I’ve become slightly obsessed with garden paths. Our original intention in the kitchen garden was to use bark, but we plumped for shingle in the end on the basis that it might deter slug and snails and also that it sounds so nice and country when you crunch about on it. It’s a decision we’ve […]
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In mid-december last year, I answered the door to a harried-looking delivery man who declared (in a rather surly voice) that he had a 37 box delivery for me and that he had to be back on the road in minutes. I was enormously confused, I hadn’t ordered anything recently, and was on the verge […]
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I’ve long agreed with William Morris when he said that “…have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” When I say agree, I mean in a theoretical sense of course. The amount of clutter we appear to own boggles the mind. But I digress. Most of what […]
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Back at the start of the summer we had a six metre deep, 48 metre long flowerbed dug out of our formal garden. We then added a border of flexible metal to the edge to keep the plants in (I was filling gaps with lemon balm and lemon verbena, both of which have become seriously […]
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In the middle of what has arguably been the best summer in years, the only people complaining about the heat are the gardeners, myself amongst them. How glorious to sip a g&t on a sunny evening! How less so to be robbed of that opportunity because of a stupid pipe dream about setting up a […]
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In an effort to be more green I decided that I should use up the plastic plant labels I got as part of a gardening pack. However, disaster has struck! I wrote on them in what I believed to be indelible ink and it all appears to have washed off! This means that I am […]
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One of the main reasons we’ve always wanted our own smallholding was to be as self-sufficient as possible in terms of food. Given that I’ve always loved gardening, it seemed a natural next step. In London I used to grow as much food as I could in our tiny patio garden and so when moved […]
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London to Land Girl 