A long weekend of Autumnal gardening 

A day off on Friday coincided with good weather – which was lucky as we have a LOT of gardening jobs to do!! Having put grass seed down two weeks ago, we’ve not been able to rake for fear of taking the seed with the leaves. It’s meant the garden has looked pretty unkempt ever since (especially with the recent high winds) – but two days of leaf blowing and raking, and everywhere is looking much tidier. We do now have two giant white sacks of leaves though, ready for our first attempts at mulching! 

On the plus side, the grass seed has definitely started to germinate in the lawns around the farmhouse. The orchard and wood look to be further behind, partly down to using a different ‘shady’ seed, and partly because there’s less sunshine to spur the growth on. We also didn’t top-dress the seed in those areas (basically spreading topsoil around with the drag mat – see our blog from 24th October) – which is likely to have made a difference.  

Another job that’s been on our to-do list since last year is to finish clearing the old compost bins. They’re made of the old metal and wooden shippon doors and are completely falling apart. We started to empty them last year, but realised we shouldn’t have been filling them with pine needles that wouldn’t compost, and abandoned the job when the weather turned and we were left with a wet soggy mess to sort through. Since then we’ve barely had time to touch them – so getting round to taking them apart is a big win. They’re located at the end of our shippon and right where our new lounge will be – so it’s nice to be able to stand there and see the view from our future living room window! 

We’ve continued planting bulbs along the edge of our wood – it’s proving far harder than we ever anticipated, with unbelievable amounts of rocks and roots. I think we filled two wheelbarrows full of rocks and four trugs of roots on Saturday alone!  

We’re starting to make progress though – with the end triangle complete and roughly 10 metres planted (out of a stretch of 44m). At a guess we have about a quarter of the bulbs left – it’s hard to know whether we’ve got enough or not, but the remaining stretch narrows quite significantly so we may be able to make them last. We’ve already decided that if we run out, we’ll finish the end part off next year! 

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