The new garden - May 2013

With a new house comes a new garden to play with. It’s significantly different from our last place. We’ve swapped a tiny, no-so-private courtyard with raised beds that overlooked the fields to a “grown-up” garden with lawn, patio, grass, trees and flowers slap bang in the middle of suburbia. I certainly don’t miss sitting on our crowded courtyard wondering if a mouse was about to run out from the wood store I was sitting next to.

Before now we’ve only ever known a garden with fruit and vegetables, now we have a host of new plants and completely different soil to work with. You could say it’s a bit of pot luck and the last few months have been a steep learning curve.

From the old house I brought with me my cherished herb garden grown in big planters, our grapevine that was a wedding present 6 years ago plus a tiny white alpine strawberry plant that managed to seed itself another planter. As it turns out we moved at the perfect time to transplant a grapevine thanks to advice from Mark Diacono. The extended cold snap helped to keep the vine dormant until we could replant it and over the last week we’ve spotted the leaf buds are beginning to appear. Everything else came with the new house.

As we bought the house during a winter that seemed to go on for ever, we’re only beginning to see the garden come in to life now and interestingly it appears to include plants I wanted to put in the garden in the first place. We have tulips in some beautiful colours (including what appears to be the stunning Queen of the Night variety), cherry blossom, lots of muscari, a small pear tree, clematis, rose, day lillies, honeysuckle and more.

At the weekend we planted a Katy apple tree which we’ve decided to train against a wall to turn it in to an espalier. This means it has been seriously lopped to get it to grow in the right direction.

Currently we have no vegetables. The raised beds in the garden are not in the best condition so they are going to be rebuilt and all I’ve asked is that I can grow golden raspberries, possibly my favourite fruit in the whole world. There is also talk of the pizza oven and outdoor kitchen that Hubs dreams of being built to go with the tandoor oven.

We seem to have lots of worms and bees in the garden which is good along with the odd swallow that has joined us in the evenings recently. We’ll ignore the prevalence of pigeons and collared doves. So here’s to a new garden chapter for us and my goodness do we have so much to learn.