Welcome to my Sunday

6 December

Well the day started spectacularly; stunning sunshine and blue skies. The great thing about most Sundays is that if you get up and out before 9am there is usually no-one around. So I crept out of the house (as much as you can with 3 Jack Russells, one of whom is as obedient as a recalcitrant teenager) and into the beech woods that run behind us. The winds that we have had means that all the leaves are now carpeting the ground rather than the trees – fantastic fun if you are a dog with ‘manic’ as your second name. The leaves also hide a great source of food for a number of small and larger birds. The chaffinches are there in droves fossiking around; jays – I saw a group of 3 together – are busy burying acorns; and all the small tits are scurrying around trying to find the last of the insects; blue tits, great tits and my favourite the long tailed tits. The joy about the woods too is that it is relatively dry. Unlike the gardens we currently look after. The rain has left many of them a squelching mess (and the day has now turned grey with more rain pouring down). At this time of year we are doing the last grass cutting (if we can even get onto the lawns). It is a bit like playing box and cox around the place. All of our clients pray for a dry day when we are due to visit and then of course it pours with rain - again. Luckily most of the gardens we look after are so up and together that there is very little last minute work to do before we close for Christmas.

That said, December is one of our busiest months. We are frenetic cutting back perennials; cutting lawn edges and putting down layers of soil conditioner which act as a mulch and over the winter gets pulled into the soil by the worms.

Bulbs are already showing their new growth; I have seen early daffodil and snowdrops poking their first points of green above the soil. And, I have also seen new green leaf buds on some hazel behind us. I hope that there will soon be some seriously cold weather else spring will be upon us before we have even had winter!