A ‘2025 major job’ ticked off – Farmhouse front garden tidying

This week we’ve had a near-single focus – to finish tidying the Farmhouse gardens ready for the season. It’s our last ‘empty’ weekend which meant our final chance to weed the flower beds and cut things back without getting in the way of our guests, so I took Friday off to get as much done as we could. The extra day helped – over the course of the weekend we cleared all the remaining beds, including redoing the main bed to remove the deep grass roots and the three-cornered leek that we’d missed first time round. Brambles had taken over large parts of the flower beds bordering the brick path to the games room, so it took a lot of clearing. And John cut back the magnolia growing against the Farmhouse and the last bushes in the front beds. Our bonfire pile is growing!

In the main bed we took out most of the primroses that had taken over the bed and relocated them to the snowdrop bank and beneath some of the shrubs as you walk up the driveway. We extended the bed along the picket fence up to the daffodils that were planted before we moved in, to create a break between the lawn and the courtyard, making it easier to mow the lawn too as the grass isn’t up against the fence now. And somehow we also managed to plant all of the plants we’d kindly been donated by my parents – it helps to have a garden designer in the family who is willing to dig up various seedlings from their garden and pot up for us to take!

We managed to get a couple of extra jobs done too – we picked the remaining kalettes, swedes and turnips to clear the vegetable beds so that we could line them with cardboard and compost, and planted out the parsnip seeds. And we finally put the coat rack up in the games room so that building is very nearly finished too. The only thing we need to do now is put up the slate signs for the New Barn and the dog shower – we prepared them this week in case by some miracle we had time to put those up but ran out of daylight hours and energy. A job for next weekend perhaps!