When you go down to the woods today…

This weekend we built and treated a new picnic bench for our guests to use in the wood, so we now have seating for eight people. It’s the perfect place to enjoy the views across the valley – at the moment the lesser celandine is out throughout the wood and the daffodils we planted a few years ago line the fence beautifully. A few patches haven’t taken so we’ll try and replant them this autumn – it looks much better when it’s a continuous yellow line. Guests might even see one of our pheasants who live between the wood and next door’s field. Now we’re getting into Spring, our male has attracted his harem – we’ve started seeing up to 4 females clustered round the bird feeder.

We’ve had three guest reviews appear on Cottages.com this week – luckily all five stars! We mentioned a couple of weeks ago how much effort our guests have put in to leave these reviews – one had to email their review to Cottages.com and one had to email, then phone up and then fill in two forms! We’re so grateful to them for this – most people would have given up, and yet reviews are so important to us as a new holiday rental.

The rest of the weekend has been spent making progress in the garden. We planted out some of the plants we bought last week into the farmhouse front garden while our guests were out, also taking the chance to do a bit of weeding too. Turns out we didn’t manage to dig up everything in January! I rescued a couple of hazel saplings that had self-seeded – likely with some help from our resident squirrels. I’m hoping they survive so we can plant them out somewhere to coppice in 5 years’ time, and maybe even grow our own hazelnuts.

We’ve been busy in the greenhouse potting up seedlings and planting more seeds. As it’s getting slightly warmer we’ve started hardening off some of the plants and plant them out to make more space – this week we put out the strawberries, leeks (left over from last year), broad beans and first peas. We completely replanted our strawberry patch with new plants and moved it to one end of the raised bed instead of taking a long strip. It took up a lot of space and we couldn’t cover it properly, so lost all our strawberries to slugs and mice. We also potted up some of our strawberry drainpipes now the slugs can’t hide in the ivy behind them although we actually ran out of strawberry plants for the first time since we moved in!

Our parsnips are starting to come up (we seem to have far more than in previous years so I hope they all make it!!) which inspired me to start sowing seeds outside. We’ve put the first sowing of carrots, beetroot and radishes in (another reason for redoing the strawberry bed this weekend as the radishes are next to them). It’s a little too early to say for sure but it seems like the ‘no dig’ process in the kitchen garden has worked. We put cardboard down over winter and put compost on top – so far the plants are making it through the cardboard but the weeds aren’t. The only bed that’s covered in weeds is the one in the fruit cage that we didn’t cover…

The remaining seeds have been started in the greenhouse – we’re rotating the trays through the propagator as using up lots of old seeds that have low success rates and need [heat] help in germinating. Most of the beans and peas are now planted in toilet rolls (a good tip from a friend of mine). It’s exciting to see the seedlings come through – especially after last year when we were too busy with the house to grow anything successfully. It does seem like we’ve been planting an inordinate number of flowers this year to go in the front garden and the stone trough – I’m not too comfortable with them taking up valuable vegetable space!

Although we’re spending as much time as we can on garden jobs, we still have a list of ‘other’ jobs to get done when we have a moment. This week Dave the carpenter (who worked on our build) came back to fit door restrictors on the large garage and laundry wooden doors. These should stop the doors from swinging open in the wind and either bending the hinges or smashing against the stone wall. John also put another coat of waterproof treatment on the doors now they’ve dried out, so they shouldn’t swell as much in the wet winter months…