welsh hills again

It has been an extraordinary autumn.  Morning after morning up here on our hillside we have woken to golden light and heavily dewed grass.  We face South East and the morning sunlight pours in through our bedroom window, pooling gold on the carpet.  Outside everything is still flowering and glowing.  By lunchtime it is warm enough to eat outside. On many mornings the sky has been full of sun while the valley below us is brimming with mist. But by lunchtime the world emerges bright and clear and warm. Sedum throbs with bees and butterflies. Everywhere berries are ripe.  Cotoneaster herringbones its way up the stone wall by the drive. Rosehips swell. The walnut tree is laden with nuts in their glossy green cases which stain your hands a vicious black. In the edge of the hen enclosure I find this huge fungus, the size of a small plate, ignored so far by the chickens.  They are moulting and looking a bit scraggy, their feath...

OK, roll up, roll up.  Here is a change and a chance to win something! You know me.  I am a bit selfish with this blog.  I blog about what I like and what interests me.  I get a lot of emails asking me to review this and that and most of them come from people who don't seem to have read my blog or to have any  idea of what I write about so generally they cheerily get dumped!  But I had a really nice email the other day from someone who works for Wish UK .  She had clearly read my blog and thought about it and how it connected to her company and she wanted to know if I would like to run a competition.  It's not often I have the chance to give away anything nice to you lovely people so I thought I would give it a go.   Wish UK is a gift providing company. You know the sort of thing: driving a Ferrari, having a spa break, hot air ballooning, learning to fly a bird of prey.  Oddly they didnt't want to offer any of these things as a...

I was a passionate gardener for ages before I got into seed sowing.  I bought plants, read gardening books, wandered round gardens and made notes but I felt that sowing seeds was for real gardeners, real experts, too tricky, too serious for me.  It wasn't helped by a few forays into sowing hardy annuals with those free seed packets you tend to get with magazines or thrown in when you are buying something else.  I know the spiel: sow directly where they are to flower, fine tilth, thin out and all that garbage.  In my experience seeds mostly fail to germinate and the glorious patch of colour of your imagination becomes a straggly weedy bit of the garden where one or two puny love in a mist fail to make an impact on the chickweed and the dandelions. Having a greenhouse has made a difference.  Under the controlled conditions of seed trays and watering and benevolent warmth, seeds do germinate and I do notice and I do look after them.  I have discovered that g...

We move quite slowly here in terms of what goes on in the garden and then I look back and realise that we have done things and maybe it is beginning to show.   The new native hedges which went in during the autumn of 2008 are looking just a bit more settled this spring as they begin to come into leaf.  There are two lines of mixed edible planting: hawthorn for haws, blackthorn for sloes, dog roses for rose hips and hazel for nuts with one of two cherry plums for good measure.  The dog rose leafs first, its new foliage a bright green spurt against the spiny twigs. And the new fruit trees are a bit bigger this year too, even if the mulberries are still not yet as as high as my head and won't be for years either by the look of them.  The daffodils round their feet are less spotty than they have been.  They are starting to bulk up and to spread and are just beginning to look like the faintest echo of what is in my head.  It was the daffodils which set me off ...