All This Time…

 It’s almost 10 years since we moved to Damson Cottage and we’ve enjoyed seeing all sorts of wildlife in the garden and surrounding fields : hares, badgers, foxes, wood mice, moles, shrews, stoats, squirrels, and more varieties of birds than you can shake a stick at. The one disappointment is that we’ve never been visited by a hedgehog…until…(tiny trumpet fanfare)…

Ta dah!! A hedgehog!! In our garden!!! Yesterday afternoon, when I was getting the veg beds ready for the coming growing season…

(Also, ta-dah! Hard work but well worth the effort) …Nell was going berserk by one of the hedges so much so I had to build a barrier to stop her getting into the hedge. I thought perhaps she’d discovered a bird’s nest . When I let her out for a wee yesterday evening she went berserk again, barking and carrying on. And then when Lord M let her out for her late night wee he reported the same behaviour, went to investigate and there it was. A hedgehog!! I wonder if it had been hibernating in the woodpile corner next the hedge. But we have a hedgehog! You have no idea how thrilling this is for me. 

Anyway, all is cracking on apace in the garden: 

The hops are racing up the poles I have installed for them. The strawberries are spreading and putting on masses of flowers which, hopefully, means masses of strawberries:

And the greenhouse is filling up nicely, with bits and pieces almost ready to go out into the raised beds…

This morning I sowed chard and spinach directly into one of the raised beds. Some coriander, rocket and dill have self-seeded in one of the other beds, which is good. And I transferred some rogue chives that had performed a random pop-up in the courtyard. I shall transplant squash into bed 3, French beans into bed 4, courgettes into bed 5, curly kale and beetroot into bed 6. And that leaves two beds for more herbs and flowers. I have a cunning plan for the mass of baby thyme plants that are currently only an inch tall, but whether that cunning plan works or whether it goes all Baldrick is yet to be seen. 

Once most of the veg plants are transplanted I can pot on the cucumbers and they can stay in the greenhouse. I’m tempted to pop in some runner beans but they’ve given me so much grief over the years I’m in two minds as to whether I want the aggravation or whether hope is springing eternal. But I do like a runner bean…sigh…

The raised beds will be built upwards another plank’s height this year. Just waiting for my carpenter chap to set to with his drill. This means that next year I can grow more root veg, like parsnips and carrots because they won’t have to contend with the tree roots under the lawn. 

Out walking with the Nell the Poo this morning, we passed these…

Cute baby cows! 

Did I mention we have a hedgehog in the garden??