Our Spring hedging offensive has just finished - five days of hard toil and another 50 metres of hedge coppiced and replanted. With the emphasis on replanted. Most of our roadside hedge had been overrun with brambles and fern so we had to dig out the roots and replant with trees from our nursery*. Then we had to untangle the old barbed wire fence, ( Read more... )

I've just spent a large part of today cutting down potato haulm - not something I intended to do - but gardening is like that. After a very wet winter, we had a drought during April then, just as we thought we'd never see another drop of rain ever again, the heavens opened and we had the wettest May and June in living memory. Which, in the garden, ( Read more... )

Just as I thought we'd seen off the carrot fly - by planting next to the onions and watering the carrots every time they were thinned - along comes this: the carrot caterpillar.


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Just as I was honing option three of the Shift back cover blurb along comes the Shift galley proofs. Shift weighs in at 322 pages and now I have some extra reading to do over Easter ( Read more... )

Winter finally arrived on Wednesday. Just as we were getting used to minimum night-time temperatures of 10°C along came ten inches of snow, biting Arctic winds and a drop to -9°C ( Read more... )

Tribble Alert! A certain tribble, whose name I can't reveal until tomorrow (for cliffhanger reasons:) has been contacted and photographed. Story and pictures will appear in tomorrow's Kitten's Guide ( Read more... )

After losing our overwintering broccoli three years running to the minus eights and tens of unseasonably cold winters, we decided it was time to look for a new variety. So we consulted Messrs. Thomson & Morgan and found they had an ultra resistant variety that had been tempered on the glacier fields of Northern England and renowned for surviving ( Read more... )

It's that time of year again. A man's time of year, when I pull on the thick leather gloves, grab my long-poled slasher and walk off into the woods ( Read more... )

The soft warm days of our Indian Summer have finally come to an end. A winter High has slipped in - as sneaky winter Highs are wont to do - and brought with it sharp cloudless days and frosty star-filled nights. If only my telescope still worked ( Read more... )

The weather continues to amaze and astound. It's late October and outside it's 22°C (72°F). And, inside, we've only lit the fire once this autumn. Which is unheard of. Normally we have four or five fires in September and by mid-October we're lighting the fire every night. But not this year. Even when we lived in the South of France we never had an ( Read more... )