Sounding a bit like a prog rock concept album’s track listings, The Portents of Spring, has surely been followed by The Arrival of Spring.
The asparagus bed has duly started sprouting, making a delicious addition in the kitchen to the already prolific wild garlic and rhubarb.
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As our wet winter drags on, slightly lighter evening, snowdrops, crocuses and the green shoots of bulbs, all give us hope that eventually spring will be in the air.
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I’m no expert, but I would say the garden tractor tyre has picked up a puncture!
The other weekend, we let the dog out at 7am as usual for her morning pee, then went back to bed with a cup of tea.
Half an hour later, we looked out of the window to see a huge flock of sheep had mysteriously and silently, with military precision, materialised in the garden like a mass of fluffy clouds, as if we had suddenly been transported into a bizarre live action episode of Shawn the Sheep!
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Despite the dry summer, autumn dampness seemed to arrive just in time for a spectacular display of seasonal colour.
The autumn fungi seemed to enjoy it too, with an abundance of edible and non-edible varieties popping up around The Secret Acre.
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If you want to be the best, if you want to beat the rest… have a really dry year apparently… certainly some things on the smallholding have enjoyed it more than others… and not necessarily the things you might expect.
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It’s shaping up to have been a pretty good year at The Secret Acre, despite the very dry weather.
Where crops simply failed in last year’s unseasonable rain, at least the gardener has the chance to water things, especially, if like us, you live in a well-managed area like Severn Tent Water, which rarely needs a hosepipe ban.
So most things are back to growing reasonably well, even if the fruits are a bit undersized from the lack of rain.
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While we were enjoying our spring equinox BBQ earlier in the year, we were also getting round to starting the final transformation of our rebuilt ‘lean to love shack’ into a new outdoor kitchen.
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The rotavator man cometh!
Since moving to The Secret Acre, on the principal of cash poor, time rich, Paul has dug over the veg patches each spring, having never quite managed yet to get our ‘no dig’ act together sufficiently.
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Following our unexpectedly early ‘three seasons’ spring equinox BBQ, the UK weather delivered a prolonged heatwave.
Thanks to the growing climate crisis, after last year’s continuously unseasonable cold and wet spring and summer, causing England’s England second worst harvest on record, spring 2025 could prove to be one of the hottest and driest on record. We are already suffering the most extreme marine heatwave since satellite monitoring began.
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The Secret Acre 