I haven’t had much to say here over the past two months on the garden front, as I’ve been doing more waiting than working.

Waiting first for the weather to warm enough to start seedlings and direct planting (garlic and potatoes are down, various seedlings now started in the glasshouse but a ways off being ready for their next phase). Then we decided to knock down the old brick shed at the bottom of the garden, a sixty-year-old structure that was becoming increasingly death-trap like. (Upon knocking it down we realised that the bottom bricks –some extra heavy precursor to the breeze block – had turned almost to soil). Then the rain started again, turning a three/four day exercise into a three week one (which is still ongoing at time of writing).

Sifting through the wet detritus has been a thankless, backbreaking job – as we try to fashion the heavy blocks of the shed into a ‘brickery’ in the style of our coal shed brickery towards the front of the garden – which we hope will be a bee paradise filled with lavenders and hyssops and rosemary and all sorts of lovely bushy flowering plants. 

This time last year, we had transformed our garden from the plant and muck heap jungle we found on moving in, to an ivy-free orderly growing space with raised beds, a little glass house and new bamboo screening to take the edge off the hodgepodge fencing behind. We were delighted with ourselves. And then, after the unnervingly hot summer, storm after storm battered the place, ripping away the screening, soaking the soil built up around the shed and making it ever more precarious.

Hopefully in a month or so, a [brief] harmony will be restored and we can focus on the lovely business of watching new things grow. But who knows what the weather will bring. My money’s on ever more extremes.