5 years on from my first record of a year of work in this place, I thought I’d repeat the project. Partly to see how things have changed as areas of the garden have matured, and partly as certain timings have been altered as we’ve worked out how to tweak the management.

This is a simple factual record of what we were up to around the whole property, during the year 2023. It might serve as a prompt to us, as we become more forgetful, about what to do, and when. More importantly in the future, it may be an aid to whoever takes over as custodians of this very special place once we’ve left. Should they ever choose to refer to this?  A vain thought, but one never knows.

The garden won’t stay the same of course in future years – that’s simply never the case with gardens, and things evolve with time. But this record will try to capture some of the practical tips which we’ve learned from trial and error about how to look after this place, and land, in what is sometimes a challenging climate.

This is the un-glamorous and sometimes tedious aspect of living in a place like this. The necessary graft which enables us (and you) to enjoy the views and scenes throughout the year which feature in my blog posts. The few photographs and style of writing on these pages reflect this – snapped quickly as a simple aide-memoire often after the tasks are completed, and simple, typed-up factual notes, before I’ve forgotten what’s been going on.

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January – Week 1

In a week of unremitting gloom and continued wetness – a very similar start indeed to the weather in 2018 – opportunities for gardening were limited! Rainfall of over 140 mm in the week, means everywhere is waterlogged. However, work still has to be done:

Another big session of lifting and potting up snowdrops for sale to any garden visitors and later re-planting the surplus in the garden. For the first year in ages, I’ve ceased recording the relative flowering times of cultivars – having reached a certain age, I still relish tracking their opening, but the recording has simply become too much of a chore, as numbers have grown, and enjoying the snowdrop vistas, even under grey skies and an umbrella is more important to me now. 2023 has been the slowest start to a season for many years.

Some sessions of logging up previously cut timber and hedge-laying surplus, for firewood use in 2 years. Cutting back the dead Astilbe flower stems which give great interest in the late year, but have to be removed now before the early snowdrops and daffodil foliage get too tall. Monitor the bee hives for signs of life in any brief weather windows – after the coldest snap in early December for 12 years, followed by incessant wet, I fear few colonies may make it into spring of 2023, although the Daphne bholua, first Hellebore x hybridus, and Crocus ‘Firefly’ flowers all opened in the first week of January in 2023.

Work preparing for my Thought Box idea.

Cut back remaining Miscanthus/grass stems of those varieties which persist for the longest before losing leaves and making a real mess. Spent time replacing multiple large turf divots in the lower wet hay meadow, where a badger had ripped the surface extensively, looking for chafer grubs. Something which only happened for the first time in autumn 2022 in this meadow, and along with greatly increased mole activity, reflects the greater life and invertebrate population in our meadows now. Almost exactly mirroring the progression in our upper meadow, where such damage only occurred about 5 years after we began the journey to wildflower meadow restoration.

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January – Week 2

At last a day with a bit of light, and a break from the rain. Empty full green waste into 2 tiers of Worm City 1, making up with leaves from the reactor.  As is often the case I then spotted creeping buttercups in the shrubbery, and then ivy creeping in from the rear slope trees, so a great time to get them out after all this wet using an old kebab skewer I keep in a gap in the slate wall by the front door.

All the wet and activity from blackbirds meant a necessary rake up of leaves from the meadow copse paths, these being dumped on the compost, and then the tyre garden central path. Once again this job morphed into another when I hand-weeded both of the narrow border beds to the side of the central path, mainly for grass seedlings, but the odd Alchemilla and willowherb as well. Worth doing whilst all the bulb shoots are small.

3 Goldoni earth scoops of scalpings for track pothole filling finished off our afternoon. 2 days later, an unexpected dry hour allowed some mainly grass and ivy hand weeding through areas of the copse – always very easy to do at this time of the year, after all the rain.

A whole day of snowdrop potting up, using our own mixed compost. About 180 pots are done in a day. William spends a whole day raking up leaves from the lower cae efail field into big bags, where Zelkova and oak leaves take forever to rot down. Often I hoover them up with the lawnmower, but last autumn it was just too wet. A useful resource for compost/mulching in due course.

Some short sessions of grass and ivy weeding in the copse, and along the cobbled path in front of the house with my skewer, and in a rare respite from the rain, another stint on hedge laying at the top of the upper hay meadow, where I notice the badger has returned with massive damage – the first time it’s ever done damage this late in the winter. Wee marking is needed ASAP. Start to replace some massive divots, a tedious job!

All the rain meant that less than a week after our pothole filling, we were back on it again! Sometimes winter rain damage and vehicle traffic can wreak havoc in just a few days. Leave it, and in another week it’ll take 3 times as much stone to fill the holes.

Only 1 bee hive (the hay shed) has shown any activity, and this is on a day of a little sunshine, a North westerly wind, and perceived temperatures of just 4 degrees C. At least we still have some honey bees alive! I never feed or treat the on-site bees.

De-fuzz the silver birch, mid-croquet lawn border for the first time, as well as several trees in the meadow copse, and more hand weeding of the cobbles.

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January – Week 3:

Begin the day with the regular winter daily task of bringing in a firewood basket, lighting/resurrecting the wood burner, and every 3 days or so a barrow full of 4 bags of wood pellets for the biomass stove.

At last a sunny, chilly January day on the 16th. I continue with another session of laying the top boundary hedge, and nearly make it to the shepherd’s hut. We really need to finish this and clear the debris before the fragile spring bulb shoots begin to emerge in this top part of the meadow.

Later I finish replacing the badger divots. I cheer myself by thinking how fortunate I am to be working outside with such fabulous views on a wonderful chilly sunny (at last) January day. And am pleased to note that so far my efforts with wee distributed from the watering can around the likely entry trail point by Glyn’s gate, and liberally spread around the damaged turf area have put off the badger’s return.

I make time for some photography in the afternoon, and a Thought Box moment timed to perfection to catch the sinking sun shining through a yew-framed window.

The following day with William here, we press on and I manage to finish the hedge laying, and William saws up most of the brash into usable logs, down to 1-inch size, in a hard morning’s work. Snow is forecast for the afternoon, so we stop. The first flurry arrives around 2.30 pm. By evening we have a significant covering.

Some snowdrops arrive the following day, which need planting a.s.a.p. I sweep the snow off the PV panels for the first time, and Fiona and I clear both the yard and the first steep section of our track. We know from past experiences that allowing snow to build up, and then freeze can make access in and out impossible. And forecasts frequently change within hours so can be unreliable. This is exhausting work in the cold, or at least it is now!

Fiona works on fixing lichen fragments to our surplus “Ripples” ring offcuts, for a new mobile idea I’ve just had.

Fiona is also now in the daily hay-feeding mode for our ewes in the lower meadows, which is where we try to store most of our hay in the lower shed. Overnight, after a period of melting up until 10 pm, more hail falls and we have another hard frost.

The following day everything is melded snow, ice, and hail. It takes me an hour to clear the PV panels, the worst I’ve ever known, and frankly, I’m knackered after doing this. The yard/paths stay almost unchanged all day. No chance of getting out, even if we wanted to. But lots of fabulous light, which is a relief after the recent gloom.

January – Week 4: 

With a very slow thaw continuing well into this week, there’s little chance for outside work. We finished modifying the lichen mobile, and I ended up writing a very long blog post including both a video of this in action, and of foraging honey bees from the hay shed hive, whilst there’s still thick ice, and minus 7 temperatures registered on the croquet lawn.

Finally, on Wednesday, 10 days after it all fell, temperatures warmed slightly, and we had light rain all day, and that did the trick. It’s fascinating to see the last parts of the garden lose their snow after a really cold spell like this – presumably the coldest. I scatter accumulated sacks of wood ash from the stoves across the upper sections of the top hay meadow. By the end of the day, only the cleared piles of snow in the yard remained. I was amazed to find one hive apparently being robbed out at 6 degrees C in the drizzle, and light winds on January 25th. Is this a record early date for witnessing such a thing, I wonder? Plus the better news of signs of life in the Swedish butter churn hive, which is following on from its maternal hive of origin, which had pushed out 3 swarms last year, so would have been left very weakened.

William and I had a good day clearing brash into piles ready for burning if we can just get a few dry days and some wind next week. We carry up some replacement fencing posts and dump them by ones that are wobbling in the breeze. This is a necessary regular annual chore to keep the fencing in good order. W. does an excellent job collecting molehills to top off the new growing/propagation beds above the Amelanchier. Exhausted by my morning’s efforts, I potter with finishing hand weeding the cobbled path in front of the house, and tidying up the barn, for potential garden visitors from next week.

With garden visitors potentially visiting in just over a week, it’s time for some final tidying. In the main barn. Sweeping the leaves and debris from the path behind the yard, aided with our small Makita Li-ion blower.

Cutting back the Verbena rigida stems and tidying up the edges of the washing spiral designs. Hand weeding the top of this area.

I finish the week by making a cover for our hay feeder based on 4 hurdles.

A bit more tidying of brash in the top field and a serious session of hand weeding and tidying of both the lower tyre garden and the rose bed. It’s always surprising just how many willowherb seedlings are at quite an advanced stage of growth.

A final tidy-up of dead stems around the terrace garden. In particular, Aquilegia stems are easy to pull out this late in the season, but the dead stems of Euphorbia cyparissias always have to be traced back to their base. They’d probably rot eventually but detract from the Ophiopogon and emerging snowdrops.

Cut back the final ferns at the base of the rose bed slope.

February – Week 1:

Dig out the old rotten timbers from the dais on the croquet lawn and enlarge the trench for new sleeper retainers. Spend some time before lunch shifting trays of pots with seedlings in and then some videoing of snowdrops and honey bees – their first visit of the year today on January 30th. Finish the day with more pot sorting and pot up some more snowdrops for sale/moving.

Chainsaw up replacement sleepers for the dais. Re-locate. Tidy up the Wisteria bed. Move more pots and seedlings up to the new Amelanchier beds. Tidy the Giant Miscanthus leaves and molehill mountain plant debris. Shift more molehill soil to cover the mountain. Pot up more snowdrops/leucojums. Cut back strawberry leaves, and weed out remaining veg beds. W. tidies up sheep feeder hay wastage in the bottom fields, adding it to the big pile.

February – Week 2:

Minimal work this week, apart from photography, with several garden visitors, and suffering from a lurgy. William manages to burn one of our big bonfires of brash and tidy up waste hay.

I continue to manage the snowdrops in pots and complete a lovely YouTube compilation from 4 wonderful sunny days early in the month, which the NGS very kindly features on the national site. Probably the best scenes we’ve ever enjoyed this early in the year, with massive numbers of honey bees active in the garden and the first bumble seen on February 9th

I incorporated this YouTube into a short blog post

February – Week 3:

Start the week with a couple more garden visitors, but have to cancel a large group because of weather forecasts for later in the week, and ongoing lurgy. Cutting back summer flower Clematis stems is about all I can manage. Fortunately towards the end of the week my energy returns, in time for another little flurry of visitors.

We manage to get the remaining brash bonfires burned. I collect all the ash and charcoal bits and sift out the smaller pieces of charcoal for saving for potting compost mixes. The remainder gets spread on the lower hay meadow, where there are yet more badger divots to replace.

I always try to start the BCS machines every month or so and run them for 5 minutes and give them a quick spin, but having left them too long this winter, they won’t start so time for new spark plugs for them both, after 5 years or so.

2 more sessions of track pothole filling, and in a sure sign that I’m feeling better, I get some energy for the long job of placing the huge surplus of snowdrops that I’ve potted up, back into the garden. We’ve had a steady trickle of visitors and sold more bulbs than ever before, but 80% plus will remain to go back in the garden a.s.a.p. Fortunately, we have many gaps still to be filled, and the display this year has been fabulous. I completed a second seasonal YouTube of how the garden looked between Valentine’s and St David’s days

With a fantastic crop of blossom on our ‘Tomcot’ apricots and the nearest very active hive a little way from the greenhouse, I begin to prop the door ajar towards the end of the week, opening it around 10. am. By Sunday, just a couple of days after the door was first opened, the bees had found the blossom in serious numbers. Standing inside, there must be 100 plus bees at peak times, the buzzing is phenomenal and the scent of the flowers is nearly overwhelming. The last bees don’t leave until 5 pm when the door gets shut. We should have a great crop of fruit this year!

February – Week 4:

Week 4 is largely taken up with a wonderful time with 5 of our grandchildren minus parents staying, as well as more garden visitors. It ends up being the driest February for over 30 years. so although the weather isn’t perfect, apart from one drizzly day, we can get outside, and show them frogspawn, catkins, and primroses. And the snowdrops, as well as the delights of how to work a woodburning stove. I do manage one session of weeding down the meadow copse hedge border, always one of the worst, and most recent areas to be turned into garden. William finishes raking up leaves from the Southerly aspect of cae efail and filling more big bags with them to rot down.

Sort out some nice potato tubers ready for chitting

March – Week 1: 

More snowdrop pots were planted up into the garden. Then at last a serious day of work – with the upper meadow quite dry, we take the tractor up and begin bringing down all the chopped logs from laying the upper hedge, needing to finish this as the first daffodil flowers, grown from scattered seed are poking up.

Later in the day we collect all the molehills from the upper meadow into tubs and add them to the giant molehill, and top up the new propagation beds. Finishing with beginning to collect the ash logs from below the shrubbery area.

More garden visitors, and a WHSH snowdrop visit following up on a lovely couple of garden visitors, to a namesake house of beautiful, unusual proportions and fascinating stories, with a quite diverse naturalised snowdrop population planted up along the banked hedgerow.

Plant them up and water them in well on our return.

More photography on a glorious March 2nd. Another day of serious effort, and at last after weeks we seem up to it. I split many of the ash logs, and Fiona does a brilliant job as always of stacking them in discrete bays in the now almost empty log store. It’s always a good feeling to quickly restore our wood stocks, as soon as possible after the winter, and we always try to stack them in dry weather.

Then, with even colder weather forecast for the next fortnight, at last, I get around to sowing saved seeds including lily, meconopsis, primula, and opium poppy. I vacillate with the tomato and leek seeds.

Another day of loading 3 earth scoops of ash logs a.m., followed by splitting them p.m. It’s always pleasing at this time of the year, to get the (second) wood store re-stocked as soon as possible so that we always have about 2 years’ worth of nicely dry split logs ready to go. Something we’ve only managed in the last couple of years. Inside the house, with 4 log baskets waiting to go, and roughly a day’s worth of logs on either side of the wood burner, the wood is really nice and dry before it gets burned, making the burning much more efficient and less smokey since minimal moisture has to be driven from the wood.

I remember to water the snowdrop hunt plantings, which are wilting a bit as well as Fiona’s recent Hellebore acquisitions, now grown in dreadfully light-weight compost.

I just do the mundane fetching and splitting. The real skill, and back-bending hard work come from Fiona’s puzzle solving careful placing of the wood into separate self-supporting stacks, which makes it so much easier to use when needed, without the whole lot falling out in a rush. A joy to behold!

With the forecast jumping around from day to day, it suddenly seems that the dry spell is about to break, so with lambing only a month away, I take down the BCS power scythe to the lower wet meadow and cut about a third of the purple moor grass, around the upper pond. This isn’t as dry as it gets in some years, but it’ll be useful bedding for our ewes. Raking it up yields about 12 big bags which get dragged into the by-now half-empty lower hay shed, and tipped out so that it’ll dry more completely. A tiring morning’s work.

March – Week 2:

Away for a few nights, and wet cold weather with some snow, so limited work. Very late I pre-germinated tomato and leek seeds indoors on a damp kitchen towel, and on return, since a lot more rain was forecast, and snowdrop visitors had finished, began the planting out of the many named snowdrops in pots that were unsold, placing them into areas with none currently, as well as a couple of new forms from old Welsh sites, we were able to visit and get histories on whilst we were away.

March – Week 3:

I painstakingly plant out the pre-germinated leek seed into several large pots, using my Ghillies forceps, in the barn on another day of wet and gloom and put them in the greenhouse. Last year they were planted outside, but it’s still so cold, that I reckoned this would be a better plan. Within a day, the first shoots were appearing. With the weather now locked into grey, wet, and windy, it’s perfect for moving snowdrops in the green. Initially, William and I tackled the “bank of peril” behind the house. W picked out holes in the shaley bank, whilst I sourced large snowdrop clumps and primrose seedlings, then followed behind W with a second ladder, planting both up and backfilling with compost. No need to water in with the rain, and the hope is that in 2 or 3 years, the bank will have rivers of primrose and be carpeting with snowdrops.
Like the current rivulet of self-sown ones, which gave me the idea.

Later on Tuesday, we have our first trial of the recently acquired Pottipukti tree-planting device. It’s transformational. Initially working with W – I created the holes, which he dropped in the small snowdrop clumps, and backfilled. For the rest of the week, I work out a technique where I can do the whole job myself by just heeling the bulbs in with my boot, once dropped down the tube. No back bending, no kneeling, no head bobbing induced vertigo, just upright posture, with minimal rain issues, working from a tub of snowdrops clipped onto our Stihl strimmer shoulder harness clip, separated into small clumps of 5 or 6 bulbs, as I go. Made a YouTube video of using the Pottiputki on Friday, in a rare dry interlude.

More bulb planting later in the week. Potted up pre-germinated tomato seeds. Another session of pothole filling. Wet all week and hospitality limited options. Another session logging up the felled ash with the Stihl Li-ion.

March – Week 4:

More unsold snowdrop pots were planted. Had to switch jobs after a ewe aborted and ended up with a uterine prolapse. With days lengthening, there’s more work to do, only the constant rain and sodden conditions limit efforts.

Another session logging up the last of the felled ash from last year. Sadly far too wet to get the logs off the field yet. Manually rake out the mole hills in the steep hill – surprisingly easy with leaf rakes since the soil is still so soft after all the rain. I make a base for a new hay feeder out of pallets, and Fiona makes up a rainproof cover. Another serious snowdrop planting session with the Pottiputki. Plant out the saved chitted potatoes (Kestrel and Nadine) after weeding out 2 long beds, and arranging the water-filled bottles.

Plant out the last of the snowdrops in pots. Plant out the last potatoes and rig up a new enviromesh hoop and wire cloche type system. Weed out some remaining areas of beds and sow first carrots and lettuce in alternate rows beneath an old window supported on water-filled bottles. Maybe a bit early but worth a try after Adam Alexander’s talk suggestion – Giant Red (Real Seeds) and Red Elephant ( Australian ex Adam Alexander)  as well as Red Iceberg and Jack Ice lettuce seeds (Real Seeds).

Move some shooting rhubarb crowns to make more efficient use of them, by having them all in one area.

March: Week 5 

Another week of deep gloom and rain limited efforts. Another lengthy session of very necessary pothole filling on a rare dryish morning. Pricking out seedlings of several perennials including Knautia and Aquilegia grown last year. Re-organising the plant sales areas.

At last, a sunny and dry day allows me to both salt-treat many of the paths, as well as mowing all the grass for the first time this year. Germinated seedlings were just beginning to grow away on many of the paths. Any longer, and the hot water/salt/detergent mix won’t prevent re-growth, and it’ll require manual weeding to resolve – always far too labour-intensive. Fortunately, the nearly sunny all-day weather window put a massive amount of surplus heat into the immersion, thanks to the Immersun which provides the scalding hot water to do this salting.

 

I moved out some of the cuttings and seeds that were sown in the greenhouse, to begin to harden them off, in the enviromesh covered stock trailer.

Another session of snowdrop planting in the Malus copse with the Pottiputki. More wood ash spreading on the meadows, and for only the second time this year, a very limited sprinkling of ferric phosphate slug pellets near the shooting Clematis, veg beds, and pots of susceptible seedlings, like Erythronium which seem to have germinated very well.

At last on Sunday, a dry day and an opportunity to cut the grass for a second time in advance of a group visit. A pair of twin lambs arrive safely.

April – Week 1:

Sunshine all day again, so more salting of paths, very necessary hand weeding of some areas, and a chance, at last, to finish topping the Molinia area in the wet hay meadow – without doing this, more interesting plants won’t make it through the thatch of dead material. A general tidy-up in advance of a large group. Despite surface water, the BCS with its double tyres copes brilliantly with this job, even if it’s quite a physical workout.

The small section cut just before the rain arrived in early March –This image shows how the Molinia quickly recovers and yields fresh growth that the sheep will tackle in late summer, to a degree, as well as yielding a lot of almost seed-free, already dry, organic material for bedding/composting.

Rake it and bag it up the following day. Pot on more seedling plants. Sow pre-germinated squash and courgette seed. First, live lambs arrive so dawn till night ewe checks now, feeding and mucking out. 1 lamb dies overnight in an unexplained event, so milking out becomes necessary for one-quarter of this ewe.

Lots more hand weeding of areas of the garden. More salting of paths and grass mowing. A large group of garden visitors. Write another blog post. At last, a couple of dry days allowed me to drag a hurdle behind the Goldoni tractor in the lower wet meadows to flatten all the molehills. Works brilliantly. The fields don’t look a mess, and we know there are all those wonderful mole tunnels to help with the drainage.

Also, we can move the 5 super heavy bags of Zelkova, etc leaves up on the tractor’s earth scoop, to locate them below the compost beds. They’ll get topped off with molehill soil from cae efail once the weather relents again. Rain is due to return tomorrow. Recharge Worm City again.

April – Week 2: 

More ewe/lamb work, and leaf pulling of the thug-like Arum italicum, a weedy plant that seeds around and appears from nowhere at this time of the year. Although it will die down quite early on, it can easily swamp out other more early spring bulb foliage and build into dense clumps. Zero tolerance is required.

More hand weeding. And on a miserable wet morning, another session of snowdrop planting with the Pottipukti in the Sorbus/Malus copse, and William begins moving the mucked-out bedding onto daffodil-free grass zones, to weaken the turf for further daffodil planting in the next 12 months.

As the rain worsens, a session in the barn sieving wood/leaf mould compost for seed sowing/top dressing, and making up our own compost.

In a week with 3 of the grandchildren here, work is limited. But I do manage some photography, Fiona lays an Easter egg hunt, and impressed by the GC’s wish to look at their previous video, we choose some scenes, and I film some of the egg hunt, and then all 3 sit down and jointly edit their own short video.

Once they’ve left, more snowdrop planting – perhaps one more session will get me to the end of the Malus copse, just as the weather looks like drying up a bit. I begin the process of shifting some misplaced daffodils in the Malus copse, whilst they’re still in flower. More hand weeding around the croquet lawn beds, and rather too late, I cut back all the willow and Cornus stems, leaving the ones with fabulous, late pollen-rich flowers below the tyre garden. In some wonderful light, I managed to take some lovely photos and videos of both tulips and daffodils. At last on a sunny and briefly warm morning, I add a single insulated super to the most active, hay shed hive.

April – Week 3:

In drizzly conditions, another chance for snowdrop planting. Bring up more dry Molinia for sheep bedding.

Then finally another brighter day means a burst of activity. Replacing fence posts. Snowdrop planting – finally finished. Watering pots, many plants, and some accessible daffodils with diluted worm juice/camellia feed. Make up another compost bay/tidy up plants. More video footage of daffodils and tulips.

Fiona and I finally decide it’s safe to dead-head all the Hydrangeas.

We’ve learned from experience that doing it too early risks a late frost taking out this year’s flowers on all the macrophylla/mopheads. It’s a tedious job, but the Jakoti shears are ideal for snipping back to just above the new growth, as well as taking out any dead stems missed in the autumnal removal of shoots. We just got away with it! A frost 2 days later scorched the upper leaves of some of the more tender and exposed cultivars.

2 sessions of selective daffodil and erythronium hand pollination. Cut all the grass again. salt some paths. Bring in more logs from the field, split the thick ones, and Fiona stacks them. Produce my first what3Plants video with Clipchamp, and upload it to YouTube. More log collecting/splitting/stacking.

Lots more hand weeding – nearly got around all the garden for the second time this year, and weed levels are pretty low – for now!

2 days with garden visitors. Bring up more Molinia bedding. Dragging a big bag up from the bottom is a good workout. More hand watering.

More log splitting and stacking – we’ve now nearly filled the wood store we emptied this winter – this will give us a winter’s fuel in late 2024/2025.

More hand pollination of Erythronium, Primula sieboldii home-grown seedlings, and some more daffodils.

April – Week 4:

On a wet morning, after sheep duties, potting on small leek seedlings into my new for this year deep cellular planters – really well made and easy to handle even well-filled with our heavy wet soil-based compost. Next year I must save myself the fag, and sow directly the pre-germinated seeds into these.

I manage to fill up the last IBC water container by the hayshed, whilst we still have a plentiful flow in the stream/spring. More Hydrangea dead-heading to complete the job.

More muck/bedding shifting into the Malus/Sorbus copse to create clear planting zones for more daffodils.

Watering plants in the copse – Camellia/Hydrangeas/Rhododendrons/daffodils with either Camellia feed, or diluted worm juice.

Spend the afternoon clearing molehill soil from cae efail to top up the bags of leaf litter, brought up earlier in the year.

W. prunes off the lower scrappy branches of the birch in the lower wet meadow to open up the grass beneath.

I spent a morning shifting this brash to our LWD partial blockage in the stream. Then raking up a whole bag full of twiggy debris from the field pre-hay cutting, and dragging it up the hill. Weed out the remaining veg. big bags, apply wood ash to many of them and also begin the tedious task of hand weeding from a ladder all the unwanted stuff from the bank of peril – in particular grass, figwort, rosebay, and Alchemilla seedlings.

Continue weeding out the bank of peril. Cut all the grass again. Fiona de-brambles the “bank of death” from a ladder removing any pernicious weeds and sapling blackthorn as she goes. A rare max-out day on the PV means another mini path-salting session. A lot of hand furtling with my large tent peg, of grass and weeds from the front path, yard, and copse areas. Spot dandelion removal. Prick out all my remaining leeks and more Geranium seedlings into my newly found robust cellular root trainer trays, 45 per tray.

Place our Scamp’s daffodil order after jointly trawling his much-reduced selection this year, and jointly work through our hopeless cultivar listing to arrive at an online comprehensive and fairly accurate list. Now all I need is to get photos sorted in the next few years!

Prick out, in a hurry, the too densely sown poppy seedlings onto the giant molehill – sadly frost affected but hopefully some will survive. Another species for direct sowing into the plugs next year. Most of the seed sown directly, which had all germinated, has died off, again due to late frosts, I guess. Pull back encroaching nettles and grass clumps from over the fence along the upper croquet border. Remove a mature Camellia which despite much TLC never thrives and has sickly foliage – the copse is now so mature one doesn’t spot a gap.

Last spot weeding of the upper tyre garden before foliage really covers everything.

The annual effort to strive for placid lambs has worked well this year, with most coming to have chin tickles. We’ve never had such a calm bunch which compensates for the reduced numbers. Less than half the ewes took to the ram lamb. Another few days of bringing them all in at night, and we’ll leave them out, and the early morning starts for me will finish for another year.

May – Week 1:

Prepare the garden for a group visit with more hand weeding, and bank clearing. Put out the signs at the bottom of the track at dusk.

Great small group visit. More sheep bedding shifting to create piles in the Malus/Sorbus copse for future bulb planting. W. starts shifting/turning a compost heap and we then shift lots of compost from the bays up to the veg beds, using tubs and the Goldoni earth scoop. A great job for 2 people to spread the slog. Compost spread around emerging potatoes and to lift the level in another couple of beds. W. pots up some strawberry runners before shifting the strawberry bed later in the year.

Hoping for a benign day after the always tiring lambing period which is now over, I take a ridging hoe to hack out thistles from the top hay meadow, quartering the field, and get exhausted by also dealing with the encroaching brambles on the hedge margins. Moral – cut these back through the year to prevent them from arching down and rooting many feet away from the fence.  Left undone and in a few years you’d end up with only half the size of the field you started with, surrounded by bramble thickets, and in due course tree growth. Such is nature’s preferred default vegetation in this part of the world. It’s a real pain ripping/hacking these out. Give up with only a half-completed task.

Continue the thistle process and brambles in the lower fields the next day – only half a dozen or so thistles in each field, but again in the hay meadow, which is un-grazed through the summer months, the bramble encroachment is a big issue. As light relief, I have a session of hand watering with diluted worm juice on the veg beds, seedling pots, and whole of the terrace daffodils – only once. The very early sown carrots and lettuce, initially sown beneath a glass pane laid directly onto the water bottles, and now covered with enviromesh, show how beneficial the water bottles are in still chilly conditions. The central row is dramatically more advanced and with apparently better germination, than the outer ones without a row of bottles beside them.

I finally get around to another sowing of main crop carrots. Our very simplified veg. plans are now in hand for most areas, I just need to plant out squash and courgettes, sow a few more lettuce, and some kale/harvest the self-sown kale seedlings. I uproot many of the remaining flowering kale plants and dump them in a half barrel – they can still supply bees with some nectar and also set some seed for future years.

Dig out more wood /leaf mould waste from the stored big bags along the green lane. By now a brilliant basis for our homemade compost, after years of rotting down from an exposed log pile which we never got around to keeping dry enough to burn.

More pricking out of Devil’sbit scabious, and Sanguisorba seedlings. Shifting around pots of seedlings, cuttings, and plants to tidy things up and remove many from direct sunshine and high temperatures, should these ever arrive in 2023!

Weed out, again, the bed between the PV panels and plant out 4 courgette and 5 squash plants. Probably too close together, but easier to manage this way. Use torn squares of sheep’s wool bedding as mini plant collars. They might help reduce slugs reaching the young plants and also help root warmth. Plant them in slight depressions, and ring them with water bottles. But use a few judicious slug pellets around these plants – it’s so dispiriting to lose a season’s crop through lack of attention at this time. Cover most of the remaining bed with cardboard sheeting. I hate spending time weeding the bare soil inevitable with vegetable growing.

For the same reason, given the damp conditions of late, judicious organic SLUXX slug pellets just around the base of emerging sensitive Clematis, and near the pots of various emerging seedlings. Generally, the garden slug population has massively reduced over the years following climatic change and a much better balance of slug predators.

Cover the newly sown carrots and leek seedlings with a long enviromesh sheet. Take out a grafted Daphne from the copse, which has been dying back over the last year. It might re-shoot, but I doubt it, and if it doesn’t I’ll grub it out, once the bulbs have died back.

May – Week 2:

W and I have a morning session re-filling a couple of big bags with rotted-down logs along the green lane. This wonderful resource has come from a huge log pile harvested perhaps 17 years ago which has finally rotted down, complete with annual leaf fall. Mattocking it and sorting out small stones and tree roots, it’s a largely weed-free friable compost perfect for special uses and potting plants up with minor additions. It can sit in these out-of-the-way bags and always be on hand as a resource when needed. We no longer buy in any compost.

Make a start on my new idea – digging up daffodils in the green, and “potting” up into recycled wood pellet bags with rolled-down tops and cut-off corners/small slits. I dig up and label, and W backfills/tops up with compost. Water in. Another stint at hedgerow brambles encroaching into the field. Uproot the remaining kale plants and heel them into the giant molehill for the bees’ benefit.

Lots more pricking out of seedling DBS. Cut the grass again. Have a session collecting an earth scoop full of small stream stones to fill in the worst depressions on small sections of the access track and then backfill with Tegwyn’s roadstone. This saves imported scalpings and the larger stone will resist extreme runoff better than the small gravel/stone dust. Set up for more garden visitors. Hand weeding.

At last, I got around to planting out the tomato plants. Firstly I prune all the excess growth on the apricots and nectarines and dump the big bag of prunings for the sheep to browse. Cut back a dead Leycesteriana formosana, and all the dead Hebes in the terrace pots – we won’t replace them since all Hebes seem to have been wiped out locally this winter with the two severe cold snaps. Hand pollinates a few daffodil flowers (poeticus recurvus), probably a waste of time since never seem to get seed pods. Hand pollinate the P. sieboldii again. More path/yard salting, pee dribbling, and watering since the temperatures have warmed, and the rain has stopped for now. Move into the garden some Thalictrum seedlings from 3 years ago, and water in.

Morning photography in perfect light and wonderful Garden warbler singing. Later I turned this into a short YouTube.

More weeding and watering. Fiona starts the annual whitewashing to avoid an end-of-season rush to beat the weather. It has to be applied after the risk of frost has passed.

May – Week 3:

Another collecting session of stream stones and backfilling on the track. Cut down nettles in steep field margins with the hedge trimmer. Move a small Acer ‘Aconitifoium’ seedling in the lower meadow copse. More whitewashing. Am convinced that the larch copse hive was about to swarm – hopefully into the vacant German butter churn hive, which has been vigorously scouted in recent days.

A long session with W. digging out the compost and me shifting it up to the veg beds to top up using the Goldoni. A physical, 2 man job, but good progress. We also remove the inter-potato water bottles now and backfill these depressions with compost. This all equates to rowing up, and now the risk of frost has nearly gone, I want to maximise new compost in these beds now. Have to cover the squash and courgettes for a couple of very cool nights with F’s whitewashing sheets. W. trims back around the terrace slabs and paths. We carry up the metal hoops from the tyre garden and I opt to use them to support raspberry canes this year, and see how the tall perennials cope without them. It’s looked so much better through spring without the visual downside of seeing them there!

Now regular daily watering on a 3-day rotation – veg and hay meadow/molehill first, lower meadow copse bags/ plant sales/terrace tubs next, and the rest of terrace and greenhouse on the third day. Try to do it in the morning if possible. Re-number the lambs with spray paint on their backs – too young to ear-tag just yet, but we want to remember which is which, once they’re integrated with the rest of the flock. Dag one ewe with soiled rear legs to minimise fly strike risk, before shearing. Fiona clears out some dead wood from Acers and Clematis. I began to collect seeds from snowdrops, snowflakes, and wood anemones. All the early spring bulbs come with a rush.

Spend World Bee Day filing all morning – amazing numbers of bees all around the garden and meadows. A swarm is definitely settled into the German Butter churn hive, so spend a bit of time filming this through the week. Have a session weeding out grass from the terrace garden. A vital thing to do as the flower heads emerge. Plant out my Hydrangea cuttings from 9cm pots into molehill/big bags – they look healthier within just a few days and will be more resilient in the dry weather than left as was.

Light duties on Sunday morning, since Richard sheared the sheep late in the afternoon. A relief to get this done, and we can now amalgamate the ewes with lambs with the rest of the flock and go back to rotating them around the 4 non-hay fields every 3 to 4 days.

Plant out a couple of Clematis ‘Huldine’ cuttings from 2 years ago, water in stake, and slug pellet. It’s a really vigorous form once it gets going. Tie in other Clematis around the garden, since winds are strong at the moment and lengthy new shoots are vulnerable at this stage.

May – Week 4: 

Film and edit another What3Plants YouTube of Camassia, Allium, and Aquilegia on the front terrace.

Trim back the hedge below the PV to avoid loss of PV output.

 

Add a part drawn out super taken off last autumn, onto the PV hive. Collect more snowdrop seed, daily watering now in the morning on a 2-part cycle. Fiona does more sterling work wire brushing off the gable wall. Weed out/thin the carrots. Cut some of the grass again. Deadhead some of the Welsh poppies and Aquilegia – finessing really but we have a group coming mid-June so it’ll be nice if we can get them to last until then, plus more food for the bees!

Feed in raspberry canes between wires, as I water them.

Another session of stone collection from the stream to fill in a rutted section of the track and top-dress with scalpings. More hand-weeding. Move as many pots/root trainers as possible into at least half-shade. They need less water and seem to grow away much better. Cut the rest of the grass again. Collect some Crocus seed and Daphne bholua berries, for the very first time. They turn black very quickly and then become soft, so the bushes need careful scanning from below, every day. I’ll save them all until I have enough to sow a batch – they need sowing whilst fresh, apparently.

Fiona finishes scraping off and priming, then painting twice the house gable end. We have our method for this – it’s a constant battle facing the prevailing winds and rain, and sadly whitewash is completely inadequate, so it has always had a more impermeable coating – at least on the outside, the inside finish being breathable.

Collect Dicentra seeds and more Daphne berries.

Make a YouTube video compilation of World Bee Day 2023 out of footage shot on May 20th. More lifting of daffodils in the green into biomass pellet bags – digging out all of last autumn’s new arrivals from the Amelanchier beds, and handily lining up the labelled bags in the part shade behind the beds. Then, a few sessions collecting more molehills from the top hay meadow and barrowing them down to top up these beds. Getting into the meadow like this shows just how much it’s changed again this year – more orchids and pignut, vastly less yellow rattle – at last, we seem to be over peak rattle.

A bit more salting. Move more plants in small pots into semi-shade, as the sunshine and drought conditions continue. Daily watering now of all key areas with pots in the garden has to be split into an alternate day rota – veg/upper pots one day; and lower pots/terrace pots the next.

Drain out the “Ripples” bird bath, Kurust the metal, and double coat with Hammerite – re-fill with slightly salty water – It looks much better than having the rust-laden water we got before. Rub down and tung oil/Danish oil on the wooden and metal terrace table. Isn’t it amazing how easy it is to catch up on all these maintenance jobs when the weather is dry – day after day.

Complete the first of the time-critical seed head removals, cutting off all the Euphorbia dulcis ‘Chameleon’ to the ground, being very careful with the irritant sap, and tossing all the foliage into a big bag to wilt down and then be dumped on the bonfire base. It’s a lovely thing for a couple of months but a vigorous seeder, and a pain because of its toxic sap.

A critical time over the last 2 weeks for spotting and hoiking out any grass flower stems around the garden. Often they only become apparent amongst the beginning-to-die-back bulb foliage, as the flower heads open. Need carefully tracing back to the base and knurdling out with my tent peg. Generally around now, the weeding gets forgotten, but remembering to at least visually trawl every part of the garden in rotation is invaluable. Also hoik out anything else obvious at the same time, like tree seedlings or creeping ivy stems.

Late May/June – Week 1:

Rub down and re-paint the external shepherd’s paintwork for the first time in the 5 years since it was constructed – full marks for the Sadolin paints/stains I’d used for lasting so well. Likewise, some much overdue re-painting with the surplus Sadolin, of the PV frames – at least those parts most exposed thanks to the panel re-positioning early on, because of incorrect siting causing winter month shading! More photography/filming in glorious weather.

Fiona continues with stalwart dead-heading of poppies and Aquilegia, through much of the terrace and tyre garden and I join in. We never do this in most years, owing to lack of time, but with a few visitors due in the next 10 days, it’ll extend their season and add more flowers for the bees. A benign form of pottering. With the continued drought, sunshine, and winds, the Chrysosplenium and Saxifrage fortunei are now obviously wilting, so need some water just to keep them going. I’ll have to dip into the IBCs soon at this rate.

Continue to collect more Daphne bholua and other seeds, including the first wave of early daffodil seed pods. My efforts with hand pollinating several daffodils this year in an entirely random unrecorded way seem to have paid off, with several fat pods appearing on some, but not all forms.

Paint the shepherd’s frame and wheels with Hammerite. Photography, and daily Daphne bholua fruit collection. I realise that most of the fruit is on the Eastern side of the thickets – and most on the smaller more sheltered thickets in the meadow copse, where the 3 Panglobal seedling forms are. Watering is now a split morning and late evening affair for about 60 – 80 minutes each session, and having to cover many areas lightly just to keep the sub-layer alive. Once this crisps, I fear surface evaporation will accelerate plant losses.

Cut some lower meadow hay as a peripheral path, and get it in with minimal effort over 3 days. A dilemma, but cutting on a higher gear with the BCS seems to cut a little higher, and leave the grass less scalped so should grow back faster.

Finish staking the tomatoes and tying them in. The first flowers are about to open. Cover the strawberries with bird netting in the nick of time as the first fruit ripens. Cut another large block of lower meadow on Sunday pm.

Weed out all the root trainers of leeks and meadow plants.  And the carrots. Dig up the first potatoes formed from missed spuds last year.

June – Week 2: 

No rain still. Twice daily watering still, on a strict rotation. Turn the cut hay twice and row up late on. More Daphne seed collection. Collect Hellebore seedpods, but have left it too late – most have split already. Next up will be the rapidly drying Erythronium. Collect more daffodil seedpods from the early forms around the garden, but check the Malus copse forms and the seeds are still white, so can’t cut the grass here yet. Pull up peripheral nettle and goosegrass from the meadow copse hedge with cae efail – just in time, before flower formation.

Host the gardening club Mad Hatter’s Tea party on a glorious day. Much fun and happiness all around. In the evening, closing up the hut I find a hedgehog ambling through the meadow.

More watering, deadheading. Fiona mattocks out more thistles. I move all remaining pots into part shade as the drought continues. Parts of the ground are now cracking.

Get all the hay into piles, bagged up, and into the shed. Spend a hot day pricking out/ potting on Hydrangea and Primula seedlings. Moved them back into a shady location.

Visit a new-build near Llangranog as a follow-up to a visit by the owner to Gelli to see the wildflower meadows and discuss his interest in establishing a strip of wildflowers in his garden/on the verge using green hay.

Collect molehills of nearly pure peat from the lower meadow in advance of more hay cutting. Add this to the propagation big bags below the compost heaps. Continue to tie in growing tomatoes. First flowers open on the tomatoes, so begin to buzz pollinate them around lunchtime with the vibrator! Fiona begins the process of deadheading the Pyrenean Valerian as the first seeds begin to form, this year doing this sequentially as they go over, and taking the stems down to ground level to reduce water stress on the plants, since we have a group visit due next week and their removal always leaves a bit of a gap in this part of the garden. The seedheads get cut into a feedbag for disposal, and the stems go onto the compost heap. Fiona has a session mattock/ridge hoeing out marsh thistles from the lower meadows as flowers just begin to open. Again flowers go into a bag, and thistle stems are left to rot down

Squeeze the seeds out of all the Daphne fruit (1 per fruit), and place in damp vermiculite/gravel/rotted wood-based compost in the fridge for a month to stratify.

Dig out a special self-sown daffodil clump from the top of our bank of peril and collect all the remaining seed pods from the daffodils in the Malus copse, and then with a wet day, and then more hot sunshine and more haymaking in prospect, I take the BCS into the Malus copse to cut the by now very rank and overgrown grass.

June – Week 3:

The first rain in a month yesterday, although only 2.5 mm, meant a morning off from watering for the first time in ages. Sow some of the saved snowdrop and snowflake seeds around the bases of the Sorbus trees in the Malus/Sorbus copse. These areas were still largely grass-free after mulching around their base last year with sheep bedding, so should be a good environment for seed germination later in the autumn. The full pods had been kept cool inside the barn for several weeks and had gradually ripened and over two-thirds had begun to split.

Set up the drip line buckets just in time for a massive thunderstorm and 22 mm of rain fell in 45 minutes.

Top dress the areas of sowed snowdrop seed and finish off sowing the seed with wood /leaf mulch. W rakes up all the mown grass and puts it onto the areas already mulched with sheep bedding earlier in the year, to delineate areas for daffodil bulb planting this autumn and next spring. W. strims the steep bit of the access track and rakes off.

Another big session of hay cutting in the lower meadow, with, for the first time in ages, volunteer helpers joining us to shake the hay out.

Deadhead roses. Collect hay after 3 days, and cut some green hay for Andy, one of our helpers. Cut the grass on a high setting and garden titivate for 2 lots of international visitors. Fiona continues the vital job of deadheading the Valerian and stuffing seed heads into a feed bag, whilst the leaves and stems go on the compost heap.

Begin remedial work on the track, aiming to top dress much of the steeper sections about 12 years after we first did this and created the central channel. Keeping the chevron rain run-off channels patent and trying to create a reverse camber into the central channel is our long-term aim, but 4 earth scoops in one session are all we can manage in muggy heat with horseflies.

Regular strawberry picking and tomato tying in and pollinating. Feed the growing raspberry into the hoops.

Save more seed – Erythroniums, Limnanthes and Cirsium rivulare.

June – Week 4:

More track work – another serious session, I’m inching my way up Kerri’s field now. Dig up more daffodil bulbs – the soil is still incredibly dry despite this week’s 30 mm or so of rain. Almost getting too late now to lift and find the bulbs.

Locate all the rambling roses planted last year, cane, and tie in new shoots. And give all half a can of water and some worm juice. All are still alive, a couple are struggling a bit with the drought. Some already have flowers out – huge potential for the years ahead. Last week’s American rose mad gardener left a “Simply glorious” comment – these visitors are the first to see the result of the inspiration from that single visit to Sheldon Manor 29 years ago.

Harvest first bed of potatoes – never known ground as hard or dry up here, and the crop is tiny compared to last year. Sow more lettuce into root trainers – the existing, first batch has worked really well. Hand weeding of leeks in root trainers, and carrots. W strims the access track banks and hedge.

Dig up more potatoes. Move sheep again, now trying to rotate every 2 to 3 days, as the grass recovers a bit with the recent light rain. Prick out more recently emerged Hydrangea seedlings. I pick apricots daily now. F is processing as various cakes/puddings and freezing! Continue to water the most susceptible plants, e.g. bank of peril above the Amelanchier drip line and those in pots, and continue to collect rainwater and use it from tubs. Continue to dilute worm feed/water and tie in tomatoes and squash/courgettes daily if possible.

Continue to collect seeds – Lathyrus vernus, and Erythronium.

High-trim the grass again by 4mm in advance of garden visitors. It leaves the grass everywhere looking less scalped, with clover and selfheal still able to produce flowers. Fiona strims the grass back from the base of the bank behind the house, just in time to prevent seeds from falling into the gravel.

With some rain on most days, but also spells of sunshine and reasonable wind speeds, I take a chance on a small weather window and cut some more hay in the upper meadow. In the end slight drizzle the day after cutting turns into 8.5 mm overnight, so we have to work hard to get some usable hay after leaving it for 36 hours in the field, with more being taken as green hay by 2 different visitors. An active growing wasp nest inside the central pillar of the hay shed, unfortunately, has to be taken out, as we get buzzed by them.

More track work, after another load of stone arrives. Lots of photography in fantastic light.

June – Week 5: 

Lift more potatoes over a couple of days and begin planting out the leeks, watering in individually as I go, after using the large tent peg as my dibber. The root trainers have been a real boon. Dig out and pot up a tray full of Verbena hastata seedlings from the gravel in the yard.

More track work/ levelling up. Pull up more nettles and rosebay from above the long croquet bed, and serous goosegrass removal sessions from the bank and amongst the Miscanthus in the top field – it’s setting seeds now, and miss it at this stage at your peril. Likewise, American willowherb removal is critical now from anywhere in the garden where it begins to flower. My eyes are really tuned in to spot this, or stray grass seed heads anywhere in the garden.

A serious through-the-area weeding session in the lower tyre garden and below the spiral bed is needed.

Fiona finishes deadheading all the Pyrenean Valerian, and the next job will be tackling the Aquilegia seed heads.

Make a start on thinning the apples down to 1 fruit every 4 inches or so, and am grateful to Andy for help with this. It’s always surprising just how many large apples, along with deformed and codling moth-affected ones, get removed in aiming towards the optimum of about 1 fruit every 4 inches, or so.

Finish digging up the potatoes and planting out all the leeks in time for some more rain. More track levelling and I cut the grass again at 4 mm in advance of the forecast rain.

Begin to cut back the Aquilegia seedhead stems, just as the first ones ripen, and spread them onto the bank behind the house. More apple thinning and also cut back the Sweet Cicely and Purple Cow parsley in the tyre garden and meadow copse – sadly I’m a bit late with these and seed will have been dropped this year. All of this gets put onto the base of the bonfire pile. More deadheading of roses especially Lakeland.

Water/worm juice feed the newly planted leeks and squash/courgettes. Hand pollinate the courgette and squash and buzz pollinate the tomatoes. Sadly I decided to chemically treat 2 of the several wasp nests I’ve found around the property this year since they’re both located above doorways to the coshed and upper hay barn and have started to buzz us when we enter. So use a foam-based spray at dusk to minimise the risk to any bees. We leave the other nests we’ve found alone!

Begin to pick the black currants, just as the blackbirds start to nab them all.

More track work!

July – Week 1:

More track work – we’re up to the middle gate by now, and have topped up most of the worst sections – apart from our steep bit! We have to take the lopper down to tackle drooping low branches on the whole of the access track after Lloyds mentioned it was getting a bit low for their HIAB hydraulics.

Unload/stack a delivery of wood pellets and 3 more IBCs. Fiona and W help me to position these, and W digs out a hole for one at the back of the compost heap, whilst I dig out for one by the greenhouse. After a bit of rain, I managed to fill both up – which preludes a change to more rain during the week and is now in the forecast for most of July!

Continue to cut back Aquilegias and scatter the seed stems on the rear bank and down the track verges. Daily pollinate any squash and courgette flowers – I’ve come to the conclusion that the bumblebees would rather visit the Stachys flowers in the meadows and terraces. Continue to pick a punnet of blackcurrants a day. Narrowly avoid yet another wasp nest beneath the bushes – the 6th I’ve found in the last 3 weeks. Buzz/tie in and water the tomatoes. W cuts back the lower field hedges.

Filming in the top meadow during a brief sunny spell. Common Bent is looking fabulous right now as a pink-brown haze. Collect large and small Camassia seed heads from the meadow copse and terrace garden.

2 sessions top dressing on our steep section of track, after F mattocks off the worst of the humps. Cut the grass again and I cut the inner track hedge in the meadow copse and lower tyre garden hedge. But can’t finish all the grass after both F and I were buzzed by a honey bee from the German butter churn hive on a (recently rare) sunny, muggy 24 degrees C day. I’d filmed the hive from close by just 2 hours earlier and was dripping with sweat as I scattered grass clippings in cae efail just a few yards from the hive and in line with their flight line. Just 3 days after a full moon… all classic primers for an angsty bee to warn me away, chasing me halfway down the field!

Continue with regular worm juice/watering of the squash and leeks, and try to pick off any rust-affected leaves which are now starting to show on quite a few leeks. This now seems to be a real issue for us with growing leeks. More weeding of courgette beds. Collect Camassia seed from the terrace and lower meadow copse, stripping off the seedheads.

July – Week 2:  Finish the grass cutting in a brief respite from rain. Collect some sheep sorrel and sorrel seeds – the sorrel sheds seeds much earlier and has nearly all gone by now. Away for most of the week, which turns out to be a week of significant rain here, including St Swithin’s Day, so it looks like our water supplies are now sorted for the year!

On return, with garden visitors due the following day, and during a day of heavy rain and strong winds, it takes me all day going around half the garden route cutting/pulling back flopped foliage and seed heads and starting with removing a large branch from an Acer ripped off in the winds and rain in our absence.

Hand pull back the sea campion etc. along the front of the house, and cutting back Acanthus and Japanese Anemone from the other side of the path. This always needs doing around now to keep the path passable. Pick strawberries and the very first of the raspberries to dissuade blackbirds from snaffling them. They always get the first few, but then tend to leave them alone – I think once the blackberries begin to ripen.

Cut back the dying Sweet Cicely foliage from the meadow copse to let the Saxifrage fortunei and stolonifera foliage get more of a chance.

Now’s the time of the year to keep checking everywhere for rosebay willowherb seedpods and even missed Goosegrass trailing stems. Pull up finished flower stems of the Alstroemeria to try to extend their season.

Fiona chainsaws out several Buddleia base stems which didn’t survive the winter, along with ‘Cecelia’ – one of the spirally trained apples which had looked sickly for 18 months and was now completely devoid of leaves. Nothing lives forever, and an apparent gap is always visually better than a dead plant, which catches the eye. It won’t be replaced.

July – Week 3:

More sessions on the track. At last, we seem to be getting somewhere, and a day of 30mm of rain sees me down the track finessing run-off channels – always a miserable job, but the best way of working out where any potential overtopping points are. By the end, all is draining well.

We have to catch, clip off and treat a single ewe with an early patch of fly strike along the mid-point of her back. Start to sieve out seeds and store them in the fridge, or in the case of daffodils and Camassia, scatter the seeds directly into areas of the upper hay meadow.

Have several sessions planting out the well-grown plug plants of early Devils-bit Scabious, Greater Burnet and Geranium sylvaticum.

William grubs out some brambles from the lower wet meadow ditches before rain calls a halt at midday. With very few dry days since early June, there’s still no prospect of further hay being cut, and the aftermath in the lower meadow has recovered brilliantly with an extensive second wave of flowering. The field butterflies are having a wonderful time in the brief dry interludes.

I sow the pre-germinated Daphne bholua seeds which is very exciting – perhaps 90 show signs of life after about 6 weeks in the fridge, with roots emerging or seed cases beginning to split. Half are sown into root trainers (45) into a mix of mainly wood-based homemade compost with some sieved river gravel, vermiculite, a small amount of ordinary home-made compost and a dash of dried seaweed and a small yoghurt tub of charcoal. The remainder are sowed in the most shaded strip of the between PV panels deep bed, in between young leeks. I protect the areas with slug pellets since I’ve noticed before that young Daphne rooted layers planted in these locations suffered slug damage.

A quieter week and after F’s mum returns home after a few days here, I pull out all the Nectaroscordum seed heads. This year, after predominantly honey bee pollination, with few wasps, there seems to be better viable seed formation, so I snip off many of the viable seed capsules over areas where I hope to establish the bulbs in years to come. 

July – Week 4:

On a rare dry afternoon, I manage to cut all the grass again. F strims the edges.

W and I trim the upper hay meadow hedges, and W trims up the slab edges on the terrace, as well as strimming the peripheral bits of the Sorbus/Malus copse which he hasn’t managed to do until now with all the wet weather. I cut the holly hedges at either end of the terrace, the lower meadow copse hedge and a few of the hollies near the greenhouse, which always tidies up their roughly mushroom shapes. This is getting progressively easier with time as they grow less vigorously each year.

With all the rain the leek beds and other veg beds need a serious hand weeding, and also with leek rust a big issue once more, I try to go through all the leeks every 3 or 4 days picking off or pinching off any affected parts of leaves. Despite this savagery, they’re actually growing well this year.

Put out jam jar wasp traps on the 25th since the several (known) wasp nests this year are now showing signs of breaking down with wasps attacking the first jay-savaged apples. Rodents (rats or mice) have also started to trash the carrots, chewing off tops, and gnawing off carrot tops in the ground. I leave a few small piles of ferric phosphate slug pellets in the hope that this will stop them. After a sunny afternoon, there’s at last enough hot water to salt-treat all the cobbled paths again and spot-treat the yard for weeds.

Cut down the foxglove flower stems from the bank of peril which are just beginning to go to seed, and lay them down – visually a big improvement.

Another couple of sessions on the track after yet another load of stone was dumped. We’re closing in on finishing all this top dressing, thank goodness. More weeding on veg beds, and on another rare half-dry day I cut the grass again and manage to salt a few more areas of the yard.

BT changed a pole on the track, so I processed the old one, taking off the fixtures and cutting it up into 5 potential gate posts/strainers – it’s extraordinary how much deeper the preservative penetrates these posts than the conventional bought gate posts which are often rotting within 10 years.

Scatter more seeds in the upper meadow – Camassia small and large, some Crocus and saved large flowered daffodil seeds around the perimeter of the Malus copse. Little photography with all the wet gloomy weather, but 2 moments of delight when I see the first hummingbird hawk moth of the year in the terrace on John’s Salvia, and before that get a fabulous brief glimpse of a Clouded Yellow butterfly flitting through the top hay meadow.

August – Week 1:

Guests are here much of the week. But serious session planting out dug daffodils from earlier in the year which had been sitting in wood pellet bags, into the grass-suppressed patches in the Malus copse. Already shooting roots. W trims back edges on some of the terrace paths.

Collect some more meadow seed species. Some had weeding in the yard and the first picking of apples after the jays have once more trashed the earliest varieties. A garden walk round and titivation session in the rain before our first ever Dutch visitors arrive.

On the Sunday afternoon, a hint of what passes for a weather window sees me cutting 2 more sections of hay meadow (we still have nearly two-thirds un-cut after the sixth wettest July on record).

Keep monitoring the now germinating Daphne bholua seedlings which as I expected seem to be a slug delicacy, so need protecting with Ferric phosphate pellets in all this wet weather, at least until they have a few mature leaves.

Continue to collect the early form of Devil’s-bit Scabious seeds as the seed heads mature.

August – Week 2: 

With Fiona’s back tweaked just as I finished cutting I endured a day of real toil spreading out the hay, and then rowing it up as a way of protecting it from the “drizzle” forecast in 2 of the forecasts for Monday night/Tuesday.

In the end, 12 mm of rain falls in the next 24 hours, the rest of Wednesday is grey cool and still, so nothing happens to the hay until Thursday when the weather briefly warms up to about 22 Deg. C, a strong breeze picks up, and we even get some sunshine.

Thank goodness F’s back has now improved, so we have to turn all this hay manually twice, shake it out once, and then push it into piles, and bag it up, getting it by 7.30 pm about half an hour before more rain returns. Many thanks to Andy who once more came over to lend a hand around tea time. So very imperfect hay, but at least we probably now have enough to get through the winter. But talk about exhausting.

August – Week 3:

Another cold wet week limited activity, then suddenly a weather window opened and a chance for a catch-up. Meanwhile, we had a bad case of fly strike in one of our ewes which required manual clipping and treatment. The constant wet has clearly caused problems since none of the sheep have any actual soiled wool.

W and I filled dustbins of molehill soil saved from last winter, to have inside for seed sowing on wet autumnal days. We potted up/re-filled some wood pellet bags with daffodils lifted in the spring.

W cut back a lot of hellebore leaves for me to shred on the croquet lawn, an annual late summer tack, and place the shredded leaves into the greenhouse compost “reactor”. I cut all the grass again. And salted the paths and yard.

I make up Worm City again.

With a sunny Tuesday, August 15th drying the grass, I cut another big swathe of hay in the top meadow, in the afternoon and began to manually shake it out, knowing we had a maximum of 2 dry days forecast.

A gorgeous foggy dewy morning saw us both at work on this – spreading a heavier crop manually in the first instance gives the best chance of getting dry in such a short time frame with less-than-ideal temperatures or sunshine. By late morning, we turned the hay once with the mini-Molon, repeating this in mid-afternoon. At last, the autumn raspberries are beginning to crop, so daily picking to deter the blackbirds – they soon get the message and head elsewhere for blackberries.

The following day, which had been forecast to be hot sunshine after a stunning sunrise turned out to be much cooler and cloudy from late morning, with showers then threatened. Fiona shifted over the minimal hay from earlier cuttings in this field, ready for the latest batch. The hay was turned again with the Molon mid-morning once the dew had dried from the cut grass, then once more just before lunch and pushed into big piles. Many thanks to Andy again for coming over and helping with this.

Fiona and I opted to delay lunch, bagging up and shifting the less than 48-hour hay into the shed before collapsing for a mid-afternoon lunch. In the end, the rain held off until the following morning, but better safe than sorry, since it’s rained every day again in the forecast now. Leave the hay shed doors open for better ventilation after checking the forecast wind direction, and pick some more meadow seeds.

We have a serious blackberry picking session up in Sifigwm forest to escape the house on yet another grey wet day. I sow my first trays of meadow seeds into smaller root trainers (60 per tray), filling them with the molehill soil which is amazingly stone-free (thanks worms). Sowing onto the surface after gently tapping down to settle the soil, I very lightly cover the seed with our own rotted wood compost. Sow several seeds per cell, and for the eyebright and yellow rattle, I snip off some seed heads of creeping bent onto the cells as well.

Another wet morning sees me repeating this with more seeds. Fiona strims the lawn edges and I have to cut the grass again, with much growth in a week. Regular daily raspberry picking now, and still pick off leaf rust-affected leaves every 4 days.

August – Week 4:

Fiona cuts back a big bag full of knapweed foliage from the terrace garden into a big bag which I drag down into the lower meadow to spread along the stream bank and ditch margins, to supplement the few plants already flowering there.

I sow more meadow seeds, hand weed the leek beds and rip out all the squash and courgettes – for the first time, we have no squash formed at all and have had only a smattering of courgettes. They’ve all rotted off probably due to the constant dampness and lack of light. This was the readout from the PV inverter for a particularly gloomy day – we should be getting nearer 15-20 KWH per day in mid-August. The Met Office summary for the summer of 2023, and indeed August 2023 confirms that August 2023 had only 50-70% of the 30 year average for sunlight in our small area of South West Wales. Even if it was the 8th warmest summer on record apparently.

I begin to do pre-emptive pee dribbling around the upper hay meadow to try to deter the badgers from their recent annual turf-ripping sessions.

With continual wet weather, we have a spate of fly strike cases for the first time, despite none of the ewes or lambs having any obvious mucky soiling. We lose a ewe who gets into a ditch and sticks beneath brambles after becoming fly-struck. All depressing with the gloomy conditions. We allow them all the begin to graze the lower wet meadow aftermath, with its better range of diverse plants. Lots of special photography of DBS flowers and insects.

August/September – Week 1:

W and I move all the daffodil bulbs up to beneath the Amelanchiers after topping some up. We refill the dustbins with molehill soil. Rip out the old strawberry beds and replant runners in a neighbouring bed and carry the growing array of seed-sown meadow plants which are already germinating to what was the squash bed, after first laying down cardboard sheeting for weed suppression.

Pick raspberries every other day. Continue to pick off rust-affected leek leaves every few days. Continue to sow meadow seeds and collect seeds on rare dry days.

Cut back more knapweed and scatter the seed heads into the meadows. Continue to collect Devil’s bit Scabious and Betony seeds – for the first year, we have many flowering in the top meadow.

At last, a high-pressure system develops as we move into September and with 4 dry days of sunshine and mid-twenties temperatures, I cut most of the remaining upper meadow. With so much wet grass, we do a hand shake out of the worst clumps on day 2 and delay using the machine turner until 2 days after cutting.

Cut all the grass again, and do some weeding in the meadow copse and lower tyre garden.

September – Week 2:

With Monday forecast to be 26 degrees C, it’s time to machine turn (and hence scarify and de-thatch the meadow) the cut hay. Over the next 2 days, we manage to get all the dry hay we need in, at last. And save some for a friend, as well as cutting a final section as green hay for another would-be meadow relative.

In extreme humidity, on the slope, this was a major effort, and we were relieved to have booked a week away to recuperate after this.

In desperation, and for the first time in nearly a decade I resort to weed wiping the yard grass and other seedlings with glyphosate. There just hasn’t been enough sunshine to allow frequent enough salting of weed seedlings at the small stage, so many have gone beyond the point where hot water and salt will kill them.

September – Week 3:

On our return, a single dry day allowed raspberry picking, lawn cutting, and then in light rain more meadow seed sowing. more track work, clearing chevrons in advance of 3 days of heavy rain and thunderstorms.

Raking up the green hay which had been spread in the Malus copse, and Fiona even manually cleared out a section of blocked ditch in the lower field.

September – Week 4: 

A really wet week sees little chance for outside work. I spent a few days on a long blog post and my first poem in ages. More raspberry picking, weeding in veg beds. and pulling off rust-affected leek leaves.

Separate out the cull ewes and ram lamb and move them onto the upper hay meadow aftermath. Bring in firewood for the first time in ages. Continue with pee marking in both fields after the lower hay meadow gets significant badger damage in just 2 days.

With late-season garden visitors, cut/strim grass. And a big titivation of path edges and weeding in advance of their visit. A rare week of drift.

September – Week 5:

Final titivation before some late-season garden visitors. Begin the big weed out of the bank of peril – particularly Alchemilla mollis seedlings, grass and a few brambles.

A good session with William and I hedge trimming with our Makita Li-ion trimmers gets most of them tidied in advance of more rain and the first named storm, Agnes, due tomorrow.

Prepare some more root trainers for sowing during the heaviest showers. Begin the bulb planting on the terrace with some more Triteleia, which seem to survive fairly well here.

The day ends early when after strimming the slope due West of the vegetable area, W slips whilst raking up the grass, and, in shorts (?), gashes his leg on the end of the aluminium PV supporting rack system. Deep enough for stitches to be needed, I thought, so dressed the wound and off to casualty for him. Not a good end for his birthday!

On a rare dry day, I managed to get 2 of the external doors painted. Our aim in the increasingly wet climate here is to try to paint all the gloss at least every 2 years – we managed it all last September – but no such chance this year. The only dry spell early in the month being reserved for late hay-making. Next year we’ll prioritise such painting for earlier in the year – leave it over 2 years between sessions, and the preparation and repair work becomes so much more time-consuming, it outweighs the cost and time saving.

The rest of the week remains very wet with limited outside work possible – some more bulb planting, work on a new mini-talk about bees, raspberry picking and regular pee dribbling in both hay meadows, particularly around the obvious entry points to deter badgers from ripping up the turf.

October – Week 1: 

At last a few days of slightly drier weather allow some more productive work outside. Another session on the track, pothole filling, and I continue to plant bulbs including getting all the Scamp’s daffodils into the Malus/Sorbus copse. I photograph and record where the new cultivars have gone – a pity I’ve not been so organised with all the earlier plantings!

I manage another intense session pulling out Alchemilla seedlings from the bank of peril. At last, the autumn raspberry picking is slowing to a session every 3 days or so.

Another leek rust leaf removal session, and I begin the process of snowdrop cultivar bulb lifting and potting up. I’ve never managed to do it this early before, but at this point, most have no leaves at all, and the early ones have just the hint of leaf buds, so much less disruption.

October Week – 2:

I continue with a big blitz of snowdrop bulb planting and have managed to get about 300 pots done by the end of the week – almost enough for next year, and much earlier than in previous years.

I also finished planting all the Scamp’s daffodils and am just left with Allium and Tulips to do. On a wonderfully warm day and sunny day, at last, with temperatures nearing 20 degrees C, and well away from a full moon, I put the excluders onto the 2 modified National hives around 3.30 pm. The following morning I take off a super of honey from each, and the following day I remove the excluders. This year it’s worked really well on both hives with very few bees left inside the supers. the downside to it being so late was that there was a lot more comb between the super and the lower box.

Yet more fly strike issues on one ewe, and a couple of lambs need dagging and preventive Crovect treatment since there are still lots of green bottles around.

We also managed to do some more external painting – I did the doors and cills, and Fiona the whitewash. We’ve never had such a tricky year for getting external painting done.

Start to pick all the remaining apples into boxes and store in the stable.

Continue with regular pee marking to keep the badgers at bay in the hay meadow. Working well so far!

October Week – 3:  

Finish picking the apples, and friends come to pick the cider apples to take away and juice – my days of cider making are long over as I’ve been largely alcohol-free for years now. A bit more painting/cill treatment in advance of the rain’s return.

With more heavy rain forecast, I have a session clearing out track chevrons and the fine gravel that builds up in the central channel, putting it out onto the track – it makes such a difference to erosion if we get a really heavy downpour to have these clear.

Collect more rotted-down wood compost from the green lane, to have in the barn for seed sowing/potting on wet days. Have another Worm City session. Water the meadow seeds and other plants in root trainers with some diluted worm juice – the first/last such treatment they’ll get this year.

Plant the remaining Allium bulbs in the magic terrace.

October – Week 4:

The week begins with a short run of dry days. So I have an initial cutback of the magic terrace area using the Makita hedge trimmer, leaving the cut material to dry out for a couple of days before collecting and dumping it on the bonfire seed – too many seeds left in it to add to the compost.

I opted to leave the insect-attracting Asters to the North intact, as well as John’s Salvia hyans-like form which was visited by both Bumblebees and a hummingbird hawk moth on two occasions up to October 17th. I scatter the remaining seeds of the early Asters onto the bank of peril by carrying the cut stems over and leaving them in situ.

I also use the same technique with the hedge trimmer on the bank of peril to top the DBS seed heads et al, leaving them in situ for now.

First session collecting leaves along the green lane, using the lawn mower. After turning over the rotted-down leaf mould into the front part of “the reactor”, the shredded leaves go into the back section and watered in with pee. I use the Li-ion lawnmower to give the whole of the Malus/Sorbus copse a trim and collect on the highest (7mm) setting, adding the clippings to the surplus rotting down hay pile. It’s a big area and a bit of a slog, but it should help the daffodils and snowdrops in this area to grow away well, and give a great display next spring.

Give a secondary light strim over the bank behind the PV, and then use the lawnmower on the croquet lawn to collect the first leaves which have fallen. Use a slightly lower, 6mm setting to try to leave some of the many small fungi which are popping up here now, including the very rare Earthtongues.

 

Fiona collects 2 tubs of acorns from the lawn with the leaf rake – looks like it’s another mast year.

Strim half of the remaining area in front of the PV hive on a blustery day. Plant the remaining Triteleia bulbs in the rusty pheasant gravel area as a trial. Spread some more wood ash on the terrace.

October – Week 5:

Begin cutting back in the tyre garden – ferns, perennial, in a random fashion, as is my want, but beginning with those plants that have finished flowering and ideally set seed, and leaving any with flowers still on, or seed just forming (such as some late flowering Asters). All debris goes into big bags and is dragged down to the compost heap.

Having collected the last order of daffodils from Richard at Farmyard, I have an intensive session getting them in the ground – ‘Actaea’ and ‘Thalia’ into the terrace garden, and the leftover ‘Actaea’ into the Malus copse and on the bank above the PV panels.

Have another session sowing some remaining bulb seeds – Crocus, Camassia and Erythronium into large root trainers. Fiona begins some apple tree pruning.

Continue with pee dribbling in the 2 hay meadows to deter badger turf ripping. Plant out many of the Saxifrage fortunei seedlings into areas of the meadow copse.

Have a session collecting the many snowdrop bulbs from the meadow copse which mole/vole tunnelling have brought to the surface. It’s never happened to this degree before, and I’ve managed to collect them before leaf fall hides them. They’re planted the same day both into the lower bank of peril and also in about 3’s into this end of the Malus copse.

A rare lovely sunny day allows for some photography with autumn leaf colour developing in a rush – much later than usual. 

With the raspberries beginning to shade the PV panels as the sun sinks lower, and the crop trickling away to a minimum, I opt to prune off all the canes, dragging them in big bags to the bonfire site.

Spend some time at night and day slowly walking the stream bank, hoping to spot a spawning salmonid, and after all these years I’m rewarded with seeing by torchlight a big, probably sewin, on the night of the Hunter’s Moon.

November – Week 1:

Seizing the brief dry interludes, I cut back more perennials and ferns in the tyre garden. Sow some more seeds into root trainers. Shift germinated meadow plants into full sun from their now permanently shaded bed between the PV. Cover the first half with enviromesh. The photos below show how these seedlings seem to survive (so far!) in the incredibly wet conditions this autumn.

Finish pruning the raspberries, and also finish cutting back the asters and other perennials in the main area of the terrace garden with much more rain in the forecast.

On a rare dry day, we have a session filling in potholes on the track, and then I do yet more cutting back in the tyre garden. On a daily walk into the lower meadows, I take out some of the upper pond outflow stones to lower the level by about 9 inches, to aid survival of some of the peripheral Iris ensata.

Regular monitoring of daily rainfall totals reminds me to keep the under-track drain rodded out since anything over 34 mm of rain in 24 hours always gets a spring running out from the South East corner of the main barn, which would otherwise run down the main access track causing significant erosion.

Continue with cutting back in the tyre garden in rare dry moments. Collect some Selinum wallichianum seeds first. All of this gets dragged/carried down to the compost heaps in big bags. Any plant like marjoram with vast quantities of seed, gets dumped at the base of the bonfire site.

Begin the annual leaf tidy, late this year, because of all the rain, using our tiny but brilliant Makita Li-ion blower on paths in the copse.

Pot out, and on, some Saxifrage fortunei seedlings from this spring – some into root trainers, and a few into 9cm pots.

November – Week 2: 

Begin planting up the tulip bulbs ( the very last of any bulbs for this year). First to go in, between the showers, are 100 ‘Peppermint Stick’ into the copse area. Backfill with rotted leaf mould from the reactor, and make sure I dribble pee around this area for the next couple of weeks to deter squirrels. Tulips and Alliums are likely to be the only bulbs planted from now on with economic and physical constraints!

I’ve been putting out occasional targeted rodent poison in the outbuildings for a couple of months now. As well as cementing up holes at the base of the house walls, which often get opened up at this time of the year by mice, desperate to get inside and escape from the wet, I think. I do a complete circuit of the base of the wall in autumn looking for telltale signs where the white wash has been scraped away.

It’s a constant battle – our home is now a lovely warm, dry refuge and a target for such ingressions, which can cause havoc with electrics, as we discovered in a fortunately very limited episode this year.

Many more sessions cutting back perennials this week, as more bulbs begin to node through. The meadow copse with all the Pyrenean Valerian, and the shrubbery with Dahlias, marjoram and Sedum. All of this was done with my hand Jakoti shears, and lugging the debris down to the compost heap in big bags.

Then the long border in front of the house.

Then tackling the long croquet border, though I do this very crudely with the lawn mower on a high setting. Doing it this way is easier and quicker on the back, and with this material, I just scatter the shredded debris back into the same space.

Once done, collected leaves from the yard and paths, picked up and shredded by the lawnmower are scattered in a fairly thin layer over the beds where I’ve removed all the perennial material – beginning with the long croquet bed, then the terrace garden, and finally the shrubbery. This year leaf removal has been unusually late and difficult given the very mild and very wet autumn, but I’ll have managed most of it, in the nick of time.

November – Week 3:

With yet more wet weather, I need to do another short pothole filling session on the track, then another long stint on leaf collection, shredding and scattering.

Once an area has been treated in this way, I also begin the process of scattering saved wood ash from the stoves onto all areas of the garden, beginning with those with most of the bulbs, and mentally trying to remember which areas I have already done. This is always a bit random, but by the end of winter, most areas of the garden should have had at least one dose of wood ash.

Continue with pruning the apple trees, trying to get the job finished in the dry before bulb noses have pushed up and get trampled. Cut back ferns and perennials in the lower tyre garden area.

William clears out the old tomato plants and stakes from the greenhouse. Although still flowering, I hack back the Dahlia merckii from the spiral big-bag planter as snowdrops are beginning to emerge here. And make sure I mulch this area immediately to protect against likely harsh frosts.

With lore more Acer leaves coming off in the meadow copse, I collect these with the lawnmower, and scatter them over the terrace garden.

Much of the rest of the week continues in the same vein – multiple leaf collection with the lawnmower and scattering the leaves onto those areas cleared of perennial foliage. As well as adding seaweed and wood ash, I reckon this is vital to gradually build up healthy soils and micro-organisms.

Whilst much of the cutting back is done manually, with Jakotis, which is a chore, it does allow for the critical spotting and removing of seedling trees, which in the wet soil and with only one season’s growth pull out fairly easily. Missed, and left in over winter, they’re much harder to remove and need some sort of implement to loosen the roots.

On a rare dry day, I also use the lawnmower to cut off the evergreen old Epimedium foliage around the borders of the croquet lawn and scatter it back on the same area, allowing spring bulbs more light.

Using the 10-foot tripod ladder, I prune the top of the yew windows/viaduct. Another couple of years and the effect should be as I imagined, once the concept of creating windows through to the distant countryside, fell into place. I also mattocked out the remaining 2 grotty-looking Hydrangeas from this bed, leaving a stripped-down, reduced plant palette, with just Camellia, red stemmed Cornus sanguinea, and the yew, for over winter interest.

I re-trim the holly hedge on the terrace, and as with the yew, am very pleased with how nearly 27 years after first planting out the seedling hedge, it’s now morphed into a contoured shape in two planes, echoing the trees and hills behind. Having cut back the Buddleia very severely in the shrubbery border I trim back and shape the overgrown Eleagnus.

November – Week 4:

Yet another brief session on the track with the ridging hoe, clearing out the chevron channels and lifting out gravel from the flatter sections of the central channel. It’s a critical time of the year when leaves are all falling for blockages to occur, and with no dry days yet in November, serious erosion can happen after a deluge.

Continue on with cutting back perennials – more ferns, more Crocosmia, more Pyrenean Valerian, more Dahlia merckii. More leaf collecting, and spreading onto border areas. It’s at this time of the year that one yearns for the jobs to get finished, and enjoy a  bit of rest in the now much shorter days before the snowdrops begin to get going.

I finished planting the tulips in both the terrace tubs (T. ‘Ice Stick’ a new AGM form I’m trying – 100 of these), as well as the tried and tested T. ‘Flaming Purissima’ (300 of these) over the whole of the terrace garden. It’s always said to be better to plant tulips later to reduce disease issues. I’ve never been this late before, but it does mean that the whole area has been cut back and mulched with collected leaves already. I’ve also had a couple of months of intermittent use of rodent poison in the outbuildings to minimise the risk of predation. I continue to dribble pee around the areas of the garden to help prevent bulbs from being dug out and eaten by both rodents and squirrels. I’ve also left more windfall apples this year in the tyre garden as a distraction feed for rodents and birds.

We have a second session of raking leaves off the storage bay roofs along the green lane. Some leaves go into the insulated compost bay behind the greenhouse, and those which I manage to chop up with the lawnmower go directly onto beds/ areas of the garden away from mature trees.

With 2 x 20 KG of dry seaweed meal arrived at last, I scatter this lightly over the whole of the garden including the Malus and Sorbus copse.

November/December – Week 5:

More leaf collection and mulching. More cutting back of any missed ferns, which are now becoming obvious, as they flop over.

William has a final trim around the terrace slabs which always tidies the area up.

Cut back half the Miscanthus/grasses below the spiral bed. Always worth doing this before the leaves start to blow off, or it becomes a huge job to tidy them all up.

The ewe lambs and ewes can be re-united after the tup is collected, so it’s now easier to move them all around the fields every 3 days or so, to get the top hay field grazed as short as possible by the end of December, which is when we always take the sheep out completely for the year, to allow spring bulbs to grow away undamaged.

I begin to collect the Zelkova leaves along the track beneath them at the base of cae efail, with the lawn mower. Filling big bags just to the point where I can still drag them up the hill, these can go straight onto the tyres in the tyre garden, just as more of the early snowdrop blooms are starting to push through. this is the first year I’ve done it this way. previously I’ve used leaf mould from the compost reactor. But this way seems simpler and the Zelkova and oak leaves from the trees along this track will provide an attractive mulch/ appearance over the whole of the tyre garden, yet still be easier enough for bulbs to push through.

With hard frosts arriving this is done in the nick of time. After 30 years of living here, I work out that parking the car in the yard, beneath the oak and against the large barn wall, (rather than behind the house by the back door which is where we normally park it) means the car warms much faster, with ice melting on any morning after a clear night and hard frost. It’s probably also a big help in terms of preserving battery power – just a pity it’s taken me all this time to work this one out!

December – Weeks 2/3!:

At last, after trying to keep up to date with this record, I’m cheating and amalgamating  notes into a double week. In part because the weather has been so grey and damp that little can be done around the garden, in part because I’m pretty much up to date with where I want the garden to be at this time. There are always more jobs to do – de-fuzzing of trees/ cloud pruning Camellias which typically get missed, but this is a time for easing off a bit, and enjoying more of a break, as the first snowdrops begin to emerge in numbers. Our favourite G. ‘Mrs. Macnamara’, below:

 

However all the wet weather plays havoc on the track, so I’ve had 2 more sessions with pothole filling and top dressing, with another load of stone delivered.

I’ve nearly finished the top dressing of beds/tyres with chopped leaves, just in time. Since first snowdrops (‘Gabriel’, above)are already up and open on December 11th.

Too late, I cut back all the field Miscanthus with the hedge trimmer. Too late, because once it begins to shed leaves, they blow everywhere and have to be hand collected individually, which is a real chore.

I carry in many of the bits of rusty metal into the barn to give William a wet weather job of rubbing them down and giving them a coat of Danish oil, which keeps them remarkably tidy and durable. Carried back out in the nick of time to watch a fabulous Geminid display on the night of the 13th. We now try to do this oil treatment on an annual basis.

December – Weeks4/5:

Another quiet time bringing us to the end of the year. In part because of continued poor wet and sometimes windy weather. In part because of reduced light. In part because of the joy of having a bit of a break!

Yet more track sessions were need both before and during Storm Gerrit, which dropped over 50 mm of rain in 48 hours, and coming just after the annual trimming of hedges along the track, and late leaf fall, there was much scope for channels blocking. Quite a lot of branch and twig debris to clear, as well.

A very few moments for checking the potted snowdrops, which have done better than ever, with this year’s system of setting the pots directly onto the ground, rather than in trays, and using compost with no added granular fertiliser.

More piling up of cleared Miscanthus stems. More general decluttering inside and out, with trips to the tip.

Finally, a bit of late defuzzing of Acers in rare drier moments. This and Camellia thinning is one of the last jobs in the garden, which often gets missed in a very wet autumn/winter like this year.

I begin feeding hay to the sheep in the upper hay meadow. Although there’s still much grass left owing to the mild winter, and reduced ewe numbers, we always aim to take the ewes out of the top field on January 1st to allow early spring bulbs to grow through, so want to use up at least some of the stored hay by then. My regular pee sprinkling around the field has cetrainlywon helped keep the badgers at bay to date, with no turf ripping in this field. Possibly as a result of the deterrence of other predators and ground-based wildlife, it’s been a great year, so far for watching woodcock flying into/over this meadow at dusk. One of the real delights of winter life here – now that I know about it!

And this seems a good place to finish. Phew! I won’t be repeating this record, but it gives a rough idea of how we manage Gelli Uchaf – land, garden and house, through the year.