Matron's New Garden

We've arrived!  Just last Friday Daisy and I moved into our beautiful house in the New Forest, Hampshire.  I am looking forward to sharing the beginnings of my new veggie garden.  Another exciting devlopment here is that my broadband speeds are much better, so whereas my old house took 15 minutes to upload a photo, here it is a mere 15 seconds!

 Straight down to business!  The main feature that swayed my decision to buy this house was the beautiful garden with two full size eating apple trees.  You can see from these photos that they are in need of some pruning.  We are just getting to the end of the season where you can do pruning before they spring into life for the Summer.

 I have found a wonderful local gardener who has good knowledge of how to prune trees rather than just hack away at them.  It is an art as well, deciding which branches stay and which go. You can see that many of these branches overlap, cross each other and grow inwards.  Apparently with a well pruned tree, a bird is supposed to be able to fly through the tree without hitting a branch!

 These lovely old trees are full of character, as well as a covering of moss and lichen.

The growth of lichens are a good sign that I have much cleaner air down here than I did in London.   The trees are going to get their first prune in the next couple of days so I am itching to get started on the garden.

Previous owners filled up a compost bin with last years' windfalls - so I think I am going to start a new compost heap!  Oh what fun!