It’s powerful, isn’t it?
2nd October ‘25
We hope you’re having a good week. It’s all very powerful, isn’t it?! The tiredness yet the not needing as much sleep; the lethargy yet the getting so much done; the seemingly constant stuff thrown up to deal with and yet the little effort needed when it comes to actually tackling it…. I could go on.
But back down to gardening earth and last week it was so cold that we lit the fire at 10am for the 1st time this Autumn. Then, as with every day this week, as we got working and the sun came out it heated up intensely, with us peeling off the layers down to t-shirts! We’ve carried on clearing the central path - the open day on Sunday focusing us on the presentation of the gardens at this time of year when the seasons are changing. Some things have died off whilst others are still thriving….we still have some beautiful flowers offering their colours and Rosehips and Hawthorn berries that I am keeping my eye on to harvest imminently.
Phil and I have done more to the shed this week and whilst Steve was here helping Phil, I carried on with where Carole and Carolyn got to with recovering the fennel bed. If anyone has successful green fingers for growing fennel bulbs, please offer your skills to this patch of ground!
The coriander is loving this cooler weather and whilst some of the onions are curing nicely the others need slicing/dicing and freezing asap…
We really need to pay more attention to labeling our seed pots or reading the labels. We thought we were sowing a green manure after we took the peas out but it turns out the whole of the remainder of last years rocket went in! I hope peas and rocket do well together!
And talking of seed saving the lavender seed is practically throwing itself at us so we’re saving that too!
Tomorrow with our volunteers, we plan to to head out onto the neighbouring estate for a beautiful walk to visit the ancient English Oak trees. We have been offered this opportunity for a walk as the trees have offered an abundance of acorns this mast year and it seems disrespectful not to receive with gratitude and give back effort and care to nurture these now rare species back into life and into the population. Thanks to King Henry VIII the ancient woodland that was Melksham Forest and all the trees in the surrounds were taken out and chopped down. The reason that the trees on the estate neighbouring The Griffin Estate are still with us is because this was King Henry VIII’s hunting ground. Instead, he ordered for these to be pollarded. When we look at the landscape through different eyes and imagine it still with a blanket of woodland, we can almost smell and taste the different ecosystem and abundance of life that there must have been here. I don’t think we can realise how relatively dead and out of balance our environment really is and it would suggest that we don’t really know what it means to thrive.
