Venturing outside in filthy weather to plant anything during the dormant season surely cannot be called anything but a giant leap of faith. This should be the season for languishing inside with a hot cup of coffee and eagerly checking the post every morning for the arrival of seed catalogues which allow us to fantasise […]
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Raspberries make me absolutely furious. Well, supermarket ones do at least. Paying a ridiculous number of pounds for a few sad berries in their plastic punnet that inevitably rot in the car on the way home makes me livid. So it was always the case that our new kitchen garden would have a sizeable berry […]
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It took me many years to realise that the bits of garden that actually poke out of the soil are the fripperies really and that the soil itself is the bit that requires the most work. Green manures are often recommended to stem tide of weeds in the spring until you’re ready to plant, as […]
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Winter in the poly tunnel should be a time of leaves and carefully staggered late crops of things but mine looks a bit like the half price sale at a garden centre that’s going out of business. We’ve been so very busy lately that we haven’t been able to find the time to get some […]
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Yesterday I watched as our four store lambs were slaughtered and went from bouncy vivacious sheep to hung and carved carcasses. It had a greater impact on me that I could possibly have imagined and so I wanted to write about it. When we moved from London to the countryside and decided to keep animals […]
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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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“That has to be the world’s most boring way to spend £10,000” remarked my husband after we were given the terrifyingly expensive quote to replace our clapped out septic tank with a shiny new sewage treatment system. He was right, and it got me thinking about all of the other things we spend money on […]
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Keeping chickens has been something of a revelation. Who knew how seamlessly they’d fit into our lives? But now, a little under a year since we got our poor first brood, they’re just a happy part of our daily existence. Last year a survey showed that hens were the sixth most popular pet kept in […]
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I feel incredibly spoiled in saying this given how lucky I am to have all of our growing space, but I am sometimes paralysed by indecision when it comes to growing. Coming from a tiny terraced garden where I had so little space, I’m slightly overwhelmed by the amount of potential I have here. I […]
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London to Land Girl 