Auditing the new orchard

March 15, 2018.Reading time 5 minutes.

When we planted our small orchard over the winter, we did so with no knowledge of how to do so. Luckily for us, the amazing Monty Don had made a short video on how to plant bare-rooted trees which we watched the morning we decided to make a start. It took us several weekends to […]

Getting our fruit trees FIG-ured out

March 10, 2018.Reading time 3 minutes.

You may remember that a couple of years ago I was utterly baffled by a little Brown Turkey fig that I grew in a small pot on my London patio. After a year of doing nothing interesting, this small but determined fig tree suddenly started to fruit over the winter and then promptly died for […]

We are determined to DIY (or DIO!)

January 8, 2018.Reading time 4 minutes.

We’re facing a massive project here with our smallholding. We’d eventually like to be self-sufficient in most fruit and vegetables and meat, as well as cut flowers and so at the moment we’ve got a lot of big “one-off” tasks. Planting the orchard with our 32 trees was obviously one of them, and creating a […]

Country course review: cider making with Rural Courses

November 26, 2017.Reading time 4 minutes.

I’ve always loved Autumn; the crisp bright sunshine, the first fires at home, the crunchy leaf walks, the harvest and the glorious foliage. I love it so much that years ago, Mr Land Girl and I decided to have an autumnal wedding in a Portuguese vineyard near where I grew up. It’s unfortunate that neither […]

Tempus Fig-it, or, my poor confused Brown Turkey fig tree

January 30, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

I brought my very normal Brown Turkey fig tree (because of the usual space problems, I have to grow my fig tree in a pot) in from the garden about three weeks ago thinking that it probably wouldn’t survive a frost. So it’s been happily sitting in the sunlight coming through the French windows for […]