The start of February marks the traditional Druid festival of Imbolc, celebrating the beginning of spring, being about halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.
Of course these days, Imbolc is some six weeks ahead of what we now tend to think of as the official start of spring in March, but nonetheless, this is the time when the first earliest signs of the garden waking up start to appear.
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As you may know, we are no longer posting out hundreds of Christmas Cards, in favour of donating the money to charity each year instead. So make sure you have clicked the follow button here to continue to get our monthly news and next year’s e-Christmas card.
January tends to get a bad rap as a month.
We blame Pilot for letting the rot set in when they sang in their 1975 No1 hit single “January, sick and tired, you’ve been hanging on me”.
But as Josephine Nuese, author of The Country Garden pointed out, gardening really begins in January, with the dream. So come last year’s cold snap, or this year’s unseasonably mild weather, we kind of quite like January here at The Secret Acre.
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As the September harvest with its late summer sunshine gave away to increasingly damp and cool autumnal weather, we gathered in the last of the crops at The Secret Acre and started clearing down the veg beds.
Here are a few pictures from October and early November’s gradual decent into autumn.
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You might remember that last year, Emma tied on points with another competitor for first place overall as ‘Best in Show’ at our local Fruit and Veg Show.
We are nothing if not competitive here at The Secret Acre, so as the start of Village Produce Show season loomed again at the end of August, Emma was plotting to go one better this year.
And that she did, claiming the ‘Best in Show’ trophy as outright winner this year, picking up the section winner cups for Best Baker and Best Brewer en-route.
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This new book by Rebecca Bevan, beautifully illustrated by Madeleine Smith, is the perfect companion to the RHS’s Growing Vegetable & Herbs.
Between the two of them, anyone will have the confidence to successfully fill their garden with flowers, vegetables and fruit.
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We’ve seen the future of garden strimming, and it’s biodegradable!
Regular readers or visitors to The Secret Acre, will know that strimming has been a big part of our lives since moving in.
Only now, some six years on, does it feel like we have finally made good inroads into reclaiming the overgrown areas to put back into productive use. Each winter’s incremental progress requiring regular summer strimming to maintain the foothold.
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Followers of our adventures at The Secret Acre will know that we go wild for Wild Garlic.
It’s usually one of our first big forages of spring, and one of the easiest for beginners, growing profusely in woodlands over a long period, and not easily misidentified, smelling and tasting of, well, garlic.
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