A little garden assessment

On this last day of March, I thought a wee photographic assessment of how things are currently looking might come in useful, perhaps to refer back to later in the season when I'm thinking about what might need moving or where to plant one of my precious treasures transferred from the old house.

Sweet primroses seem to like this narrow gravel patch which runs the length of the garage wall.  I seem to recall that later on it is usually awash with welsh poppies (unless grandma succeeded in digging them all out, but I doubt it, thankfully).  In order not to weed out such desirables,  I must be careful to precision weed a la Hil.

Tete a tete daffodils all finished now in the troughs either side of the front door, just a few muscari seem to have escaped my attempts to rehome them last summer (they are the ones happily flowering away in the attractive black plastic pots by the back door at the moment).  But my pretty pastel blue and cream pansies from the 'dress the front garden ready for sale' campaign have revived in the warmer weather and are looking spiffing.  It makes me a bit sad though when I drive past the old house and see these lovely blue pansies in the porch and gateway planters that we left behind.  I planted the Yokohama yellow tulips in those too, as they did so well last year.  I hope she appreciates them and  doesn't dig them out...

Here's the first sighting of the bluebells that essentially infest this garden - fine in the right place (eg the shady woodland border) but in need of serious removal pretty much everywhere else, they are so rampant and self seed madly, basically suffocating all nearby plants and taking up all the room!  I was waiting for them to flower so I can identify whether they are english (good) or spanish (boo hiss v bad) bluebells.... watch this space for the decision...

This is the 'semi-woodland' semi circular border which runs along the back west-facing wall of the garage.  (I must get A to teach me how to do the whizzy stitch-photos-together-to-make-a-panorama thingy).  Big twiggy shrubs are lilacs, I think - I am keen to observe this border as it forms the main view from the windows of the bathroom and the lounge, so I'd like it to be a pleasing one.  Not too bad at the moment, and not overly infested with bluebells fortunately.

Interspersed with different background shrubs, this is essentially what the whole length of the woodland border looks like.  Lots of lovely daffs, occasional hellebores etc, and of course the ubiquitous bluebells...

Looking west along the woodland border towards the pile of felled horse chestnut at the end.  No idea why this sun loving euphorbia was ever put here, and how on earth it is surviving under what soon will become the heavy shade of the beech and walnut trees...however, survive it does - perhaps it's the dryness it likes?  Either way, it's a bit out of place but it will hopefully give me lots of cuttings or divisions to rehome to the sunnier areas of the garden.

Pretty daffodil close-up.  Just because.

Larch?  At the far end before the hedge this graceful tree has grown leaning and struggling under the massive horse chestnut.  Now that is gone, perhaps it will recover and fill out on the other side too.

This brunnera is currently spreading rather healthily around in areas of the circular island bed.  Grandma regretted introducing it.  I consider it simply to be a good plant in the wrong place.  The sunny island bed doesn't really need a tough as old boots ground cover like this, known to be a good candidate for dry shade. However, I do have lots of dry shade in the woodland border that might benefit from a tough ground cover plant like this - a spate of rehoming is required here.

Here's the conference Pear tree, suddenly covered in little leaf buds and blossom about to erupt forth!

Blossom on the greengage tree - hurray!

And nearby, like an island in the sea of bluebell foliage which is doing its best to swamp the rosey border which separates the orchard from the 'football pitch' lawn, a lone snake's head fritillary.  Must enquire with grandma whether this is self-sown or if there might be more hiding around here....

Identified site for the creation of A's new wood seasoning store, an urgently needed new dry home for the pile of felled horse chestnut so it can dry out and be ready to use next winter.  Naturally his eyes light up at the prospect of yet another opportunity to over-engineer a garden structure... but I must reign him in.  The rabbit fencing round the veggie patch is even more urgent!!!

And to finish, a glimpse at the first harvest of purple sprouting broccoli from the one surviving plant - enjoyed with minted lamb steaks from Pyne's and roast potatoes for tea.  On a Monday too...x

Normal service will (probably) be resumed shortly

But today was Mother's Day, forecast super sunny and duty called me to Exmouth for the day to cheer on the wee one in his rugby tournament, followed by a few hours on lovely Exmouth beach in the blistering March sun (truly! tho admittedly there was a bit of a breeze) and the regulation ice creams and fish and chips for tea.

A change is as good as a rest...But for 5 hours pitch side, thank heavens it was a nice day x

When the cat's away...

...the mice seem to get quite a lot of jobs done!

Had to spend the afternoon in town today having an emergency hair appointment (!) combined with a trip to Homebase for woodstain for the freshly delivered chicken house, leaving A in charge of the children and a hopeful list of chores and washing to hang out (well it has been the warmest and sunniest day so far this year).

Now if this situation were reversed, and it was me left home alone with the anklebiters on a sunny Saturday, I know for a fact that I wouldn't even get a chance to look at my 'to-do' list, never mind achieve any of it... evidently I must be going about things the wrong way...

I returned after 4 hours to find

one freshly constructed chicken house and wee run for the early days.  Admittedly, it is a cheapy one, and doesn't look like it will last a season before it warps and leaks, but hey, we have to start somewhere to decide what features are important etc, and A believes its better to make early mistakes with a cheap one than a £500 one.  This is obviously before its painted in its lovely Ronseal 'Spring Grass' colour...

Not a bad achievement considering that apparently he put it together once, inside the house in dining room, only to discover it was too wide to fit out of the door (ooo schoolboy error) and so had to take it to pieces and rebuild it outside on the driveway again!

This, however, was not all... we also now have a new (temporary) leaf bin

so that at least I can delve into the existing leaf mould/random compost mountain to mulch the flowerbeds, and have somewhere to put the stuff that I find that's not fit to use yet.  The plan is that by the autumn, hopefully before the leaves fall again (!) enough of the mountain will have been used to enable us to site a more organised run of bays with the openings facing north, which will be more easily accessible with the wheelbarrow and we will therefore have a pure leafmould production rather than the scary mixture of leafmould, grass clippings and 4 foot long branches that exists at the moment.

Of course this grand plan also involves the re-siting of the huge pile of huge logs still lingering there since the horse chestnut was felled last winter!  Fairly urgent plan to build a roofed log store for it all alongside the stone shed, as otherwise it's all just going to rot away and be no use at all.

And he even managed to remember to change over the washing!  Amazing...

All I have to do now is iron it all x

Words of wisdom for days when they are really needed...

With her kind permission, I copied this from one of my favourite bloggers Sue who writes 'Our new life in the country' and '365 Days - £365'.

I think sometimes it is important to have something written in black and white that echoes how you feel in your soul, when life is often filled with lots of other things that cloud your vision a bit.

Today was a little bit one of those days - grim weather, no real gardening (I did sow some cress seeds for the kitchen windowsill!), waiting in for a delivery and a pile of ironing staring accusingly at me.

Hoping for better weather for the weekend x

Mission fruit patch continues...

I had a lovely visitor this morning, come to see the new pad, so I didn't get out into the garden until after lunch.  However, undeterred I slogged on with the weeding of the raspberry rows.  Here's the photo so far:

I am feeling rather disappointed that I haven't finished the weeding yet - for some reason I thought I would have the time to get on to pruning the big redcurrant girls today, but it was not to be.  This was largely because this southerly end of the fruit bed seems to be riddled with wild strawberry seedlings, creeping dead nettle and proper nasty nettles!  Grrr... much slower work.

Blossom just beginning to peek out of the branches of my greengage tree today.

Chicken coop due to be delivered tomorrow!  Things are definitely moving in the right direction, even if it's slow....

Things are sprouting in the greenhouse:

And I was lucky enough to sit having my tea break under the good ship magnolia...

Can't really ask for more x

Raspberry renovations for a proper Spring day

Hurray at last for a proper Spring day when I can actually get out for hours in the garden!

Adventures at Windy Acre is today brought to you by the colour blue...

Muscari brought in pots from the old house, found to be flowering away in a dark and poky corner, so I brought them up onto the little patio area

...and by the number 3:

3 ridiculously oversized redcurrant bushes requiring maintenance pruning so I can at least walk on the path past them to the greenhouse;

3 apparently reasonable rows of raspberry plants - thought the jury is still out on which ones are summer fruiting and which are autumn fruiting, as even grandma can't remember which ones she planted where...ahem....;

and 3 hours of solid on the knees weeding with hand fork around the base of the above so that they can be liberally scattered around with wood ash from the fires and them tucked in happily for the season with a nice blanket of rotted manure for a mulch.

I remembered to take a 'before' picture, but only just - see kneeling pad, fork and buckets all out and ready to go...

Here's the view of the double row of raspberries looking from south to north.  Admittedly they look a bit ropey at the moment but hopefully they will romp along once weeded, fed and then tied in to new taut wires...

...and here's the single row, running east-west, so that the raspberries as a whole create a sort of 'L' shape around the 3 monster redcurrants and 1 extremely less monster-like blackcurrant (I do worry about the blackcurrant, he looks a bit wee and feeble alongside the rumbustious brazen buxomness of the redcurrant ladies - yes, they're definitely ladies, the sort who stick their chests out and back comb their hair...I think they are the redcurrant equivalent of the 'Fat Ladies' in the paintings by Beryl Cook!)

Here they are ready for their close-up.  You truly cannot appreciate their rude health until they accost you as you try to walk down the path.  Let's hope they deliver on their promise by bearing loads of fruit, otherwise as my nannan would have said: "All fur coat and no knickers"....

School run interrupted play, so weeding job not 100% finished today.  Looking forward to photographing it looking all nice and clean in the next few days.

In the meantime, homework is to study carefully this area where the driveway comes out onto the road, and think about ideas for planting that will work and make a cheerful welcoming entrance...

Grandma found that what she tried struggled here - even the daffodils seem to be half blind, and the Vinca is the only thing happily growing away (but then that would grow happily in a nuclear bomb crater). It's probably quite dry here? Also shady for the most part as it's facing north and east and underneath an enormous tree (Beech?) which will shortly leaf up and cast dense shade over it except in the early morning, when in the summer it could get quite warm next to those walls for a few hours at least...Hmmmmm, plenty to ponder over here!

Meet the existing orchard residents...

Having managed to download as much info from grandma as possible regarding the existing orchard trees, I thought it might be wise to note it all down whilst its fresh in my memory.

So starting from the far northwest corner and following the northern boundary hedge along, we have:

Blaisdon Plum

The Blaisdon plum - doesn't look up to much but actually is a good producer of far too many plums which are best for cooking, puddings, and makes fab jam (altho I prefer plums mixed with other fruit in jam rather than the pure beast, too sweet for me!)  This variety is from Blaisdon village in the Forest of Dean close by grandma's home village, so I suppose the young tree must have been given as a gift when they moved in, probably by Uncle Harold.
Next along the line is:

Pear Conference

This one does reasonably well I believe, the pears are quite small if i remember rightly but grandma always seemed to have a goodly stash.

Pear Unknown - but not Conference!
Time will have to tell if we can work out what variety this one is...

Now, back to the Northwest end to the start of the second row....

Plum Victoria

The baby of the orchard family - planted a few years ago to replace the much mourned fully mature and prolifically gorgeous Victoria that was lost in a storm.  Not that was indeed a tree of great fame and favour!  However this wee lady has a way to go yet, not helped I think by the fact that when purchased she did look to me like she was a trained baby for espalier or fan treatment.  Unfortunately grandma just plumbed her in and then let her bear fruit the first year - which she dutifully did rather too enthusiastically.  In fact her feeble little baby tree arms were laden, and grandma's greediness and missing no doubt the bountiful supply she used to receive from the old Victoria, she left all the plums on and of course the inevitable happened - practically all the branches snapped under the weight they were not mature enough to carry....It was very sad and extremely frustrating!!! So little baby Vicky needs some time and TLC and a watchful eye on the number of blossoms, and likely lots of thinning for the next few years while she muscles up a bit.

Next in line to baby Vicky is a gap - this winter's storms put paid to another old stalwart of the orchard, the cooking apple tree.  Fortunately the children's swing/climbing tree (poor thing) is a cooking apple too, and as its extremely large, I should not weep for I will not be short of more than enough cooking apples... So, an opportunity awaits...a gap in the orchard cries out for a new incumbent...but what should it be?

Next on from the gap is:

Golden gage - unknown variety

I confess to having favourites - this is my favourite!!! I could eat these all day every day...unfortunately so can the wasps which do tend to congregate around this tree when its in full flow.  They are so sweet and juicy they often split on the tree before they fall, so you have to check it regularly and carefully for ripe ones every day.  Hopefully the chickens in the orchard, when they arrive, will help tidy up any that fall so that we don't have wasps on the floor waiting to sting small bare feet this summer.

Last in the orchard line up is:

The 'new' apple - also a cooker

Again of unknown variety, but still quite a baby I think - altho as it's so short its much easier to harvest before they fall and bruise than the big swing tree cooker.

Just realised in my photographic mission that I have forgotten to photo the big swing tree cooker, and also the only eating apple tree, which is over the other side of the garden for some unfathomable reason...off to do so and back in a flash....

Hopefully now uploaded, this is the big swing tree, which is a cooking apple of unknown variety:

Big cooking apple tree

And lastly, the poor lonely little eating apple tree, all on its own on the far side of the garden...

Eating apple - allegedly a Cox

You can certainly see the prevailing wind direction that affects this one!

Well, there we have it, our preliminary tour of the orchard trees here at Windy Acre.  I'm very much looking forward to enjoying them in full blossom.  But i must also look up in my books when I'm supposed to grease band the trunks as I definitely remember grandma doing it, I presume to prevent grubs?

So much to do, so very little time!

Well, here I am, at the end of our 4th week here at Windy Acre.

After the adrenalin driven first few weeks - with the furore of 2 weeks to pack up the old house and garden (and sheds!) and the surprisingly painless actual moving process over and done with - the satisfying feelings I had from how much settling in we had achieved so quickly, has now well and truly disappeared.

The last 2 weeks seem to have crawled along in a haze, but a sort of panic-filled, rabbit in the headlights type of haze...I seem to have spent many hours not even pondering usefully but simply frozen in terror.  Perhaps I am just mentally and physically exhausted after the stresses of the immediate moving period.  Perhaps I am truly incapacitated by the realisation of exactly how much there is to be done in both the house and the garden.  Really there is so much that I don't know where to start, and so I can't seem to start at all.  I am dizzy with it all.

I am trying very hard to prioritise the important 'structural' things, and not get carried away wasting our time and money on decorative elements when the basics still need to be covered first.  Hopefully in this I have learned my lessons from the old house and garden!  In fact, I am quite determined not to get swept along with the superficial prettifying only to discover that hours of hard work were wasted because something had to be removed, moved or re-done later because it was in the wrong place, or something more important needed to be in that place, or more likely, something ought to have been replaced or repaired first!

However, whilst keeping all this in mind, somehow I still feel like I need to have an idea at least of the final 'shape' of things, so that I don't end up putting things in the wrong place and having to move them again.  And this is probably what is making me feel so frozen - I have still only the very faintest ideas about the final shape and look.... probably stronger with the garden than the house. But even then it is more of a feel of the overall atmosphere and style that is forming, less the actual layout etc.  Which is making is very hard to make decisions about fencing and all the things that need doing and that A wants me to make decisions on!  Argghhh...

But through the mists of panic and overwhelmed feelings, this week I am starting to gather a few clearer insights.  I don't want to make any rash moves that I will regret, but I think we need to start somewhere, so off we go....!

Definitely decided upon:

• chickens! (4 ex-battery hens to arrive hopefully end April)
• enlarging the old veg patch in order to move the main growing area out from under the shade of the hammock trees
  
  
• rabbit fencing the new enlarged veg patch - urgent as needs to be done before any green things can come out of the greenhouse and into the ground!  After last year's 'onion catastrophe' I know this must be decided upon and achieved asap.
• replacing the potting shed with a larger structure in a new location - existing one far too small even now!  I can't get anything out without climbing over everything else and knocking it all down on me, so already highly impractical.  Also by moving it's location will mean we can use the space to have more compost heap bays, as the current one is seriously undersized for the amount of garden matter, grass cuttings and chicken manure and bedding that this garden will produce.
  

But above all, keeping in my mind constantly the thought that this garden is such a different environment to the old one - there we were totally south facing, narrow, sheltered by the hill behind us to the north and the neighbours stone walls and trees to the east and west boundaries down the length of the garden.  So so sheltered!  I only realise now, how sheltered that garden was!  Ok, so the plants all used to lean inwards towards the light, and the tree branches used to sway up on high on windy days, but we never ever got knocked over by great gusts rushing across from the Bristol Channel like we do here.  Even on calm days, this garden seems so exposed.  The poor plants I have brought with me are going to have to toughen up, and I am going to have to research my plant choices carefully with wind and frost in mind.

Here the garden is sort of square (instead of long and narrow and compartmentalised), sort of west facing (well that's the main facade of the house that looks out onto the main back garden anyway) though fully open to the north, because that's where the lovely views to the Mendips are.  The northern end gets the most sun, as the southern boundary has all the enormous mature trees along it - the massive copper beech behind the garage, walnut, and single horse chestnut now that his mate has succumbed to the disease and had to be removed.  Attention will have to turn to lightening the dense canopy and shade these trees create in the summer - but that's a whole separate episode!

The prevailing wind comes from the south west so the large trees probably partially shelter us a little from that direction, although so far my experience is that the wind travels directly across the garden in a diagonal from the SW corner where the old horse chestnut used to be, evidenced by numerous completely flattened clumps of daffs in its path....  But as Hil warned me, that wind sometimes comes aggressively and destructively from the northwest, straight in from the Bristol Channel and by god its strong.  It's had the washing off the line twice already now.  The garden (and particularly the veg patch, greenhouse and all) is completely unprotected from that direction.  I can imagine this being the most damaging wind that we will need to think about.  But as that is the open field and Mendip views, we don't want to obscure it excessively - another quandary that will take some serious research and thinking time....