This is a real shame - after suffering a minor stroke Monty has decided to hang up his gardening gloves at Berryfields. I for one am really going to miss seeing him on my screen, he has been an absolute inspiration as far as I’m concerned. I love his earthyness, he almost has a Buddhist monk-like sense of calm and connectiveness with nature. He made me understand why gardening was so important to me.

Daily Telegraph Article

I sincerely hope to see him in other projects on our screens soon. Get well Monty, going to miss you!

I’ve been running a chat forum for a few months now. It’s basically a place where like-minded souls can chat about many subjects including green living, foodie subjects and recipes, rural issues and politics, smallholding, sustainable living and allotmenteering, arts, crafts and traditional trade skills, health & wellbeing, or just partake in a bit of random general chat! We currently have members from around the globe, as far reaching as Germany, South Africa and Australia, as well as a core of English folk.

The hope is that I’ll be able to expand the website to include a proper online magazine in addition to the forum. There will be articles covering subjects such as rural crafts, ethical shopping, seasonal produce, recipes, wildlife, hen and bee keeping as well as gardening tips and ways and means to live the good life. Some members have already volunteered their services to write articles on their specialisms, and I’m always on the lookout for interesting contributions. I’m also currently compiling a (free) business listing for anyone that has a service to offer or products to sell, and is a member of the website, or related to a member of the forum. The hope is that this will grow in time to provide a really comprehensive list that will prove useful for both country and town dweller.

The forum is called Rural Muse and can be found at www.ruralmuse.co.uk

I’m currently drawing up a plan to grow loads of (mostly cullinary) herbs next year - part of a little commercial enterprise I’m cooking (ho ho!) up. The other day I was out in the car with Mum, and we had to take a little detour through the grounds of Woburn Abbey (belonging to Duke and Duchess of Bedford). Mum had been there the day before and she was explaining about the walled kitchen garden. Apparently there used to be upwards of 40 gardeners at Woburn Abbey - now there are only 6. How times have changed! Anyway, we stopped and I had a quick chat with the deer that were hanging around the side of the track that leads out of the Park grounds, and then whilst we were driving along and talking, Mum revealed to me that the land and surroundings (about an acre and a half) that our house was built on (and the bit left over next to our house that was left fallow for decades) used to be a proper market garden, with chickens, vegetables, and the remains of the orchard. The neighbouring 70s terrace was built on the remaining land after our cottages and the nearby railway cottages were built, but with their postage stamp sized gardens, a generous bulk of the fallow land was left for some 20 odd years to become overgrown with brambles and bindweed. So much so that we didn’t really realise that there were all these fruit trees growing there until we cleared it when we bought it in the 90s.

So it’s really made me want to almost “put it back” to what it once was. You see, we have two parts to the Smallest Smallholding - there’s what we call the “garden”, and then the “working” Smallest Smallholding bit. The garden is obviously for flowers, socialising, pottering, and the like. The working bit is the centre of the smallest smallholding, although with my love of all things wildlifey, I admit it will be more like a potager/kitchen/market garden than just land turned over purely to arable means.

Bank Holiday weekend has been pretty busy at the Smallest Smallholding. With all the rain and mirth of the past few weeks and million gazillion other things that need doing around the place, parts of the Smallest Smallholding are looking very scrappy and unloved. But this weekend I’m trying to change that. We’ve started putting the glass back into the greenhouse (and have now found we’re a massive 8 panes down, so will be getting those on Tues), levelling out the ground around there and then sorting out the pitted ground around the crab apple. The hens have been digging out great trenches and the birds in the tree have been dropping the sunflower hulls all over the joint, so I’ve been trying to make it look just a little bit more pretty and clean.

I gave the crab apple another haircut today. Just a few branches here and there, so it looks a bit more balanced. However we’ve been talking about getting a ‘Green Skip’ a bit later on in the autumn, as there is a lot of pruning to be done at the Smallest Smallholding and nowhere near enough space to compost it all down, even when chipped or shredded. Hedges, trees, buddelias (bee and butterfly magnets) including a 20+ year old specimen with a TRUNK (yes - trunk!) circumference of about 5′ that needs some serious pruning, as well as a bionic dogwood that is threatening and to engulf and destroy all that lays in its path. So that’s a huge job on the cards for autumn. Lots of hard work but well worth it in the end - much more useful space!

For all concerned, Pattie is doing much better - thanks for the comments. She managed a full (thin, but full!) egg today - we’ve been holding back on the fruit and pasta and giving them boiled eggs, shell and all. Seem to have lost the Poultry Spice but we’ll buy another lot next week. After a dodgy egg yesterday, Yoko on the other made 2 unsuccessful trips to the nestbox today. She’s had a spot of projectile diarrhoea (lovely) but I did notice she’d been munching on some fallen damsons, so I wonder if they’re partly to blame. Hopefully tomorrow morning she will have laid again. She does very large rotund brown speckled eggs that always manage to draw some sort of exclamation from both her (she has to let half of Bedfordshire know that Yoko Is Now Laying Her Egg) and the recipients of her eggs (”good grief! would you look at that!”).

So busy, busy - nothing spectacular happening, more of a prolonged tidy up job over the next few days. Then I’ll probably have to start on my Smallest Smallholding Winter Plan. It’s still formulating but I will soon have updates and full briefing on The Plan.

Today my other half Rich put the garden gate up. Or should I say hung the garden gate? Either way, we’re very proud of our garden gate. It might seem trivial to some, but Rich managed to build the gate entirely by himself, without any power tools. There was a lot of grumbling and the occasional bout of swearing, and owing to our distinct lack of useful power tools, it took a while to construct - but he managed it.

The gate is there to stop the hens from escaping from the top of the garden, making their way up the drive and onto the road, and from there - who knows! Before we had hen-proofed properly we did find them in the neighbour’s front garden flower bed, starting to dig a hole for some dust bathing. Luckily our hens are obsessed with any sort of running water, and a quick perfunctory splosh on the floor of Rich’s cup of tea managed to do the trick, and soon we had them herded back into our back garden.

But back to the beloved gate. The gap that had to be gated off was a tricky size, and all the pre-made (and somewhat twee) gates we came across were either too small or too vast. Not to mention ridiculously expensive. So the only solution was to create our own bespoke five-bar wooden gate to suit. Having put it all together on the kitchen floor, and avoiding the cat bowls and my attempts to cook dinner around him, Rich finally managed to get the structure into an upright position, ready for painting. On further inspection we decided it looked far too new - in contrast we fondly refer to our semi-detached cottage as rustic or tumbledown - and as such we felt the gate should match. So I took to it with a hammer and bolster chisel, thumping random impressions into it and rounding off the edges. It might sound like an odd thing to do, but I remember seeing a programme about a cockney crafstmen who used to construct everything from salvage, and this is a technique he used in ageing his rustic kitchen table.

Anyhow, it’s up there now, and once it’s weathered down from it’s new(ish) slightly orangey-just-been-painted-with-wood-preserver state, I think it’ll do very nicely indeed. There’s something extremely satisfying about being able to construct home-crafted pieces. Although Rich might just wish that he hadn’t proved how handy he is with a hammer and saw, as I have a few more projects for him up my sleeve now!