Back again after a long break

3 comments

I haven’t visited this website for several years – I think I crashed my old computer and lost the info – anyway today I finally reconnected with GOY.

We moved to the North East of England three and a bit years ago – and we love it! We’re a 300 yard walk from the sea, living in an old house with a walled garden, and now have the time to relax and do stuff we want to do rather than stuff we have to do.

When we bought the house the previous owner told us that she liked wild gardens best. This, it turned out, was a fancy way of saying that she hadn’t done ANY weeding for several years. I think we had the National Collection for perennial weeds…the only one we didn’t have was Japanese Knotweed thankfully. I am still fighting weeds – well in the spring and summer anyway – and part of the garden is under weed suppressant fabric and will stay like it for a couple more years I think.

However the wild brambles produce blackberries, and the stinging nettles are handy for butterflies and compost making, and some of the wildflowers are pretty and attract insects….. So it’s not all negative.

The garden is not without its problems:- it’s oriented towards the north-east, and has more trees than a garden really needs. So the ground is rooty, and lots of the garden doesn’t get much sunshine. It also has the most useless garden shed in the history of garden sheds: it’s a two storey shed-cum-treehouse, but you can’t climb up into the treehouse cos there’s no ladder, and the shed underneath is only about 4 foot high so it’s really difficult to move around in. One day – when I’ve got nothing better to do – I’ll get around to knocking it down……

There is nowhere you can really put a greenhouse without taking up the only really sunny flower bed, and you do need a greenhouse up here for anything vaguely tender (last year I got precisely 6 tomatoes from 6 plants….).

Still I love it, and as soon as it stops being snowy/windy/rainy/miserable I shall be out there planning for this summer……I’ve just been buying plants and bulbs and seeds, you see, and now I need to work out where on earth I’m going to put them all!

• 26 Jan, 2025
• 0 likes

More blog posts by penn