Facebook can be annoying, when it throws up something that is absolutely of no interest whatsoever. This leaves me to wonder whether others find Facebook’s algorithms feed them with pages of no relevance. However, from time to time something grabs my attention. The other day there was a post, likening life to a bag of sweets. If you imagine a bag of mixed sweets, similar to ‘pick and mix’, which for me was a highlight in years past when visiting Woolworths. I imagine many

I have been watching YouTube again. This time I was looking for advice on how to prune apple trees. We have a russet apple which, most years, has provided us with a reasonable crop. However, although it has been trimmed to keep it from getting too big, I wanted to learn the correct way to prune. I watched four recordings with each one showing slightly different methods. Taking advantage of yesterday’s dry sunny morning I was out in the garden armed with secateurs, parrot

I plucked up courage, on Sunday morning, and pruned our grape vines in the manner suggested in the YouTube video I watched. As I said in my last blog, it was a bit drastic and with basically the main stems and nodules left, I remain apprehensive as to whether it will shoot come the spring. With clear night skies the Wolf Moon, the first full moon of 2022, was still visible when we took Barney out on Tuesday morning. As it was gradually sinking in the west, the rising sun in

There are some things I have difficulty in understanding the concepts; pruning is one. I have listened to talks at the Gardening Club and read about the subject but apart from raspberries, I always feel unsure when I walk towards a plant or tree, armed with secateurs, parrot bills and, for the fruit trees, loppers. I can be over zealous when it comes to cutting back, so this doesn’t help matters. Anyway, I have a list of our fruit trees and bushes showing when to prune. St

I have been reading my blogs for the first six weeks of 2021 and basically, weather wise, things are more or less the same – cold and rain pretty well every day, not exactly conducive to being out for long. On the plus side, for both years, this has provided time for me to do some extra things indoors, gradually crossing them off my winter ‘to do’ list. Thankfully we are not in lockdown this year, giving us far more freedom than in 2021. This freedom has to be in part due t

So much for me saying about it being a relatively mild winter because this week it has been; all change. We have had a visit from Jack Frost and in general the temperatures have dropped from double figures centigrade to single ones. Considering Norfolk is a dry county, we have had more than our normal rainfall. It feels as though at some point during each day, it has rained. Is this just exceptional or the result of climate change? The colder weather has not been entirely

Well here we are in 2022 and another year, Covid wise, of uncertainty. We just have to wait and see how things pan out. The village was quiet over Christmas with quite a number of holiday and second homes empty. This changed over the New Year period when there was a noticeable increase in the number of cars parked outside those properties that are not occupied on a permanent basis. On New Year’s Day afternoon, we saw what has to be, for the first day of the year, a record