I sowed tomatoes, chilli, aubergines and basil indoors over the last month and my window cills are now well and truly crowded. For flowers I also sowed cosmos (purity) and snap dragon (royal wedding).

Today I made my first sowing outdoors of beetroot (boltardy and choggia), broccoli (summer purple), leeks (musselborugh), and salad leaves ( bright and spicy and ‘baby leaves’). The garlic planted several weeks ago looks to be doing well and the early broccoli is at last cropping. A few leeks are also still going as is the perpetual spinach and some salad leaves that have been going all winter (the rocket bolted in the last  week).

In the greenhouse I have sown sugar snap peas in a gutter for transferring outside once it has germinated and some calabrese , kavalo nero  and cos lettuce in modules. I also sowed night scented stock in modules.

Full steam ahead!

Last month I completed a pretty radical round of pruning in the orchard. The pear trees got off lightly as they had done so well last year and only needed a few little snips to keep them on track, however some of the apple trees needed something more radical.

Tree number nineteen at the back didn’t even survive. It had no fruit last year and precious  little foliage.By the time I had cut off all the diseased wood there was nothing left. Sadly it was completely overcome with canker.

The cox’s orange pippin I gave a pretty radical prune for shape and also to get rid of the worst diesased wood. Hopefully it now has a more ‘open’ shape and will fruit again happily when it has recovered.

The tree in front of number 19 also bore no fruit last year- or rather there were about a dozen fruit that never matured. I gave it a radical prune and I’m also hoping that the removal of the alder tree at the beginning of the wood helps.

The Norfolk Royal I gave the start of a good prune and then gave up- I think I shall finish next year and I never even started the Spartan.

The tree behind the Spartan also had a radical prune. Again, very few fruit last year so hopefully the prune will help.

Cox’s Orange Pippin after a good prune

General view of a section of the orchard with the alder logs in the background.

A couple of weeks ago my brother came to visit with his saw. The pruning of the golden delicious tree was first on the list. It had become so over-crowded and the fruits were mostly small and pitted. We gave it a radical going over- hopefully it is cure and not kill! I also weeded around it- although the circle will need expanding when I have recovered from my recent digging exploits. I shall also top dress with fish, blood and bone as apparently calcium is what is needed to stop bitter pits on the fruit.

We also took a branch off the silver birch in the background and I weeded out the iris foetidissima (which I loath with a passion and which grows like a weed all over the garden). The whole area looks so much better now and I plan to plant a carpet of crocuses under the birch in the Autumn.

The snowdrops are also proliferating all over the garden which is wonderful. The ones here under the apple tree I took from under the weeping beech tree- the tree surgeons come to get rid of that soon and I didn’t want the snowdrops to get trampled.

The planting has been started. It still needs some filling in but I have planted, a rose, holly, dogwood, Russian sage, delphiniums, lavender, penstemons, peonies, hibiscus, ceanothus, primroses, hellebores, daffodils and alliums. Lets see what escapes the bunnies nibbling….

If I ever start talking again about creating a new flower bed, please someone stop me! This project was started back at the start of December and many, many weekends of grafting later it is finally done. I thought I would never finish! I took out about 12 buckets of rubble/bricks/old pottery, a metal saucepan, several bottles, an old trowel, a plastic bat and a large bag-full of plastic including some every odd handle shaped red things. Not to mention tree roots from the nearby hedge and countless bit of couch grass and nettle roots. The ground was light and sandy and quite stony, so I have had to add manure and compost in places and it also needed a fair bit of levelling so that the plants near the path weren’t sitting on the edge of a cliff. I hope this mixed border will be worth it in the end and all the digging will mean that most of the perennial weeds will take longer to invade.

OK, so perhaps I shouldn’t encourage the tree rats, but I do rather like them. I do not however like the way they chew the bird feeders to try to get to the peanuts. They also deter the birds who have better manners. Anyway, I thought I would try a squirrel feeder, which also looked great fun as the squirrels learn to lift the lid to get the nuts. I put it up yesterday and there is no sign of interest yet- however I also haven’t seen the squirrel at the bird feeders, perhaps they got fed up with the constant interruptions and have moved away !!

Update- the squirrels love it, although they are not very good at queuing and tend not to share, so sometimes the less dominant ones have to resort to the bird feeder nuts while the rival selfishly sits on the ledge guarding the stash. The only other problem is filling it often enough and tipping in the nuts without also tipping them all over my head *sigh*…

While digging at the weekend, I unearthed concrete foundations near the patio. I suspect they were either for a shed or for the ubiquitous greenhouses in this area. Apparently according to locals, when the railway was here, local families would all grow fruit and flowers in their gardens. A man would come each afternoon on his wagon and collect what the householders had and then take it to the station for transfer to Cambridge and/or London. As my dad would say, ‘necessity is the mother of design (or is it invention?)’; something like that ! So I plan to put cobbles over the concrete pads and create a sort of dry pond bed and put my leaf bird bath on top.

I have never removed so much turf over such a large area and dug until my arms were like spaghetti, however I am determined to create large cottage-garden style borders near to the house, with plenty of flowers and interest all year round. Hard work but worth it years to come I hope.

The saying ‘grand clearance’ is a well-known saying in my family. My mother Imogen was brought up in a house with a large garden in Kent. Every Spring the family would be set to clearing the beds for the new season. Her paternal Grandfather, William Henry Hulf, living with them at the time, would come to pass judgement; “you’ve made a grand clearance!” . My mother tells me that as a young girl she was so proud. I certainly got the gardening bug from my mother’s side of the family and now my brother David is also a gardener in the grandest surroundings at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire. It’s in the genes, and the encouragement!

I found an arch hidden in the garden and decided to re-use it across the path. Unfortunately it is not very tall, however it is a lovely shape and the weather-beaten appearance looks so much better than a brand new one would have done in our very natural looking garden. I plan to grow roses over it to make a visual boundary between the ‘cottage style’ garden near to the house and the rest of the middle part of the garden.

It has been a year since we moved in, and what a wonderful one. I just love this garden and can’t wait to develop so many of my ideas. I know you are supposed to spend a year observing- and I have done lots of that, but I couldn’t help but do a few things, namely

• Weeded and underplanted the trees in the orchard
• Fenced the vegetable patch
• Cleared the raised beds and grew the first season of vegetables
• Cleaned and planted the green house
• Made a grass path in the woods
• Raised the canopy of the holm oak
• Planted a Tulip tree, two roses and Jasmine ( all gifts)
• Planted two hydrangeas, daffodil and crocus bulbs

Next year I plan to

• Make more beds near the house including a rose arch across the path to create a cottage garden feel
• Plant plum trees and other flowering shrubs in the ‘cottage garden’ area
• Continue to develop the orchard
• Put in hedges at the front of the house and in the back garden to break down the space into smaller areas
• Develop the pond area
• Have two large trees removed, the alder which competes with the orchard trees and a silver birch which overshadows part of the vegetable garden
• Propagate yew and lavender plants
• Have fun and get outside as much as I possibly can….