It’s been nearly a year since the ‘cider boys’ from the village harvested hundreds of apples from the orchard – and today we received delivery of our first crates of bottled gold. It looks amazing and tastes divine.
Category Archives: gardens
Uncovering the secrets of the walled garden (Jul 16)
When we first moved here just thinking about the amount of work that needed doing to the walled garden was overwhelming. See – The Walled Garden (Easter Weekend – Mar 30, 2013). The old vegetable patches hadn’t been tended for years, the green house was filthy and many of the glass planes broken, the orchard looked like it had never been pruned and that winter, before we arrived, the north wall had been seriously damaged in a storm.
Below – the back of the north wall. The repairs were meant to have been carried out by the previous owners…
Nearly all the garden was rough grass
April – and Ed gets started on one of the 2 overgrown vegetable patches…
The unloved orchard surrounded by mole hills
Despite the daunting task ahead, we were smitten – and one step at a time, our secret garden is starting to bloom. Ed has worked a year of magic on it and walking up the winding path to the garden door is now more exciting than ever as there’s such a treat in store…
We now have 4 impressive plots of burgeoning green; fruit as well as vegetable patches. This is our main veggie patch
The green house has had a total make-over and is currently the happy home to 5 tomato vines
At long last the north wall has been properly fixed with stone and lime mortar; a massive job that the previous owners eventually paid for…
The moles hills have also gone, the apple trees have been fed and pruned, and the meadow patches are underway – and there’s so much more to come; hedges and paths, flower borders and a DIY summer house, restored railings and replacing a section of ancient tumble-down wall with old barn doors as gates (the search is on…). It’s a vision of loveliness. We are one year in and it’s already taking shape.
July fruit from the walled garden… (Jul 12)
Wildflower meadow patch update (Jul 5)
Hot off the plane from our holiday… I go straight up to the walled garden to check on the progress of our wildflower patch. Visions of poppies and cornflowers dance in my head – but I’m sad to say it’s not good news.
Something – mouse? rabbit? dog? – has dug up nearly all of my lovingly planted seed beds. Now just 3 out of the 18 perfectly formed little plots remain. Oh dear…
“That’s gardening for you!” is Ed’s reaction which is wonderfully encouraging.
He’s suggesting that I plant some knapweed (thistle family) seedlings he’s been nurturing in the greenhouse instead – but right now I haven’t the heart. I’m downing all tools while I reconsider my fledgling gardening career.
Wild flower meadow patch (May 31 weekend)
We dream of a wild flower meadow in the paddock (see last year’s The Paddock – May 20) but as this is going to take some time, I’m getting started on a beginner’s patch in the walled garden instead.
Last year we let a lot of the grass grow unchecked – partly to cut down mowing duties and partly to see what would happen. Unlike the paddock the walled garden has no brambles, docks or nettles to deal with – so we left 3 sections of grass to grow wild this year. It’s a daily treat to open the garden door and see the pretty long stems swaying in the wind.
Now all we need is flowers…
So I’ve taken on one patch as my first real garden project. I’ve been keen to take ownership of something outside, but so far the house has taken priority. I’m also not naturally green-fingered but I’m keen to improve so I’m hoping this will kick-start me into action.
This weekend was my last chance to get going as we are away for most of June and then it will be too late to plant seeds.
I picked out blue cornflowers and red poppies (both grow wild here) from the packets Ed bought me for my birthday last year. He also found a strange implement in the gardening shed which looks like it might have been used for cutting holes in a golf course – it has a tall handle that sits on a hollow cylinder about 5 inches wide and 3 inches deep and as you twist the handle bar it cuts out round sections of earth. Armed with this and a bucket of soil and compost – I planted 18 random holes in amongst the grass – it seemed like a fitting number.
It’s a bit of an experiment. A more fool proof method might have been to plough up the earth and spread seeds mixed with sand (the gardening programmes I’m watching with Ed are starting to have the desired effect) – but the golf course version requires much less effort. Soon after we get home we should see if it’s paid off . If it has, then this could also be the answer to turning our 2 acre paddock into a meadow – as well as the beginning of my gardening career…
Signs of spring (Apr 27)
The swallows are back. Gracie and I see one sitting on the telephone wire outside the kitchen. Last spring we discovered one of their nests in a corner of the ceiling above the wood store.
Just as the flowers take turns to bloom, the return of the swallows marks the change in the season. There’s something very reassuring about experiencing life this way – and it’s also a little poignant.
As I re-learn the names of leaves and flowers and birds, Gracie is learning too – and as she gets older all this knowledge will become second nature. This is something we’d hoped for when we imagined a life in the country. The swallows’ return is a sign that we are settling in.
Buried treasure (Apr 14)
A few months ago a couple of guys asked if they could metal-detect on the land here. We’d seen them around in Mr C’s fields and they split the proceeds of anything valuable. Here is our first bit of treasure from 1855…
Yellow, yellow everywhere (Mar 23)
The daffodils are in full bloom and they’re everywhere. Gracie and I collect armfuls for the house and give a big bunch to Neil who’s up here checking the bees.
The drip drip effect (Feb 13)
We knew it was wet here on the wet west coast but even Mr C says he’s never known anything like it and he’s lived here all his life. It must have rained for at least 100 days and every day more rain is forecast.
It’s creating a few issues – firstly the drive. We can’t fill in the potholes as the road planings get washed away as soon as we lay them in. Ed did the drive just before Christmas but a couple of weeks later it was like it had never been done. We’ve been waiting ever since for a dry-spell but it’s never arrived…
Secondly the gardens – it’s almost impossible to do anything outside. We were listening to Gardener’s Question Time on the radio recently (this is what happens when you move to the country) and they were discussing how “soothing” gardening is. Ed laughed – clearly they’ve never had to garden in Scotland. And the impact on our almost moss-free lawn doesn’t bear thinking about after all that hard work last summer….
The third problem is inside. Water is dripping into some of the bedrooms from above the windows. We’ve put this down to holes in the pointing above the lintels outside. We had someone give us a rough assessment of all the pointing from ground level when we first moved in and they estimated around 60% was in tact. It appears we’ve located the other 40. Resolving this is a big job as most of the windows are very high up so the builders will need a lot of scaffolding and scaff’ is expensive…
We weren’t so naive when we bought the house to think that maintenance wouldn’t be a big issue here; the roof, the drive, the walls, the land – it all needs looking after and we expected there’d be some big expenses. The extended rain’s just given us a crash course in what our priorities should be. So our plan is to try and set aside a pot of cash every year to do 1 big maintenance job – and it looks like this coming year it will have to be the pointing.
It actually feels quite satisfying uncovering these problems and putting plans in place to resolve them despite all the effort and expense (apart from the lawn, which I fear may be a losing battle – although Ed is ever optimistic). It feels good to be investing in the house, that we are learning how to live here and that everything is slowly being repaired. And given that our initial aim was to be warm and water-tight, we’re already half way there.
Snowdrop splitting (Jan 20)
My nephew Jake and his mate Tom are here for a few days so Ed’s got them to work in the gardens. They’re snow drop splitting; taking established clumps, splitting them in 2 and replanting to make more. They split around a hundred today to cover the bank under the sycamore tree in the paddock. One of the many banks of snow-drops we hope to create.
A Castle in the Sky 