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....