It’s been a while since I last sat down and wrote on this blog.

I remember being very anxious about getting the caravan finished for April 15th when the wonderful Hanne was due to come and live in it, and work with us.

It looked like this at the beginning of March.

Then I got given this for my birthday

And with the help of Makita and one of my dear sisters, we managed to get it to look like this just in time

Tempted to move in there myself.

It has been really amazing having another pair of hands here, especially with the painstaking and a slow job of seed planting.

Once the Larch Wood Timber gang had dismantled their framing bed, and had delivered and erected the frames to make a wonderful annexe Hanne and I could get on with spending many hours in the poly tunnel, sorting, grading and planting thousands of seeds in cells.

My favourite at the moment are these Montery Pines

At this stage they look more like some delicate sea creature rather than a levathvian of the land.

Already the watering and tending of these little treasures takes up a huge amount of time, and it’s not even summer yet.

We are having a constant battle to protect the vegetable beds from our free roaming chickens, who, incidentally have over 10 acres of woodland to feed from. However they seem to favour the worms and lovely fresh green leaves in the raised beds.

Not so bad as we have built frames around the beds and netted them, but as different thing with my flower bed.

I am determined to have flowers,(sweet peas, cornflowers, corn cockles, cosmos), but also to have happy free chickens. What to do? Rather fancy a picket fence but that might be a bit twee in our wood. I will probably end up with some old saggy recycled chicken wire, which may detract somewhat from the beauty of my summer flowers, but at least protect them from the determined beaks of my girls.

Next project …. A woodland garden. I reckon the chickens might leave fruit bushes and wild raspberries alone. But then the pigeons, pheasants and squirrels all will all take a fancy.

I guess I may just have to learn to share.