COUNTRY DIARY:

planning ahead for spring

“We’ll have to wade through knee-high flowers to get to any of the trees.”

There are some people in life who launch headlong into projects, get them done and are happy with that. Then there is me. I’m a planner. I plan so much that sometimes I think I get more enjoyment out of the actual planning than the project.

When we travel I will spend months searching sites for the nicest accommodation, I’ll spend days getting the best flights, ensuring there are no early starts for airports because we are just too old for that these days. Then once I have it all booked I’ll go back most days and luxuriate over the gorgeous Airbnb I’ve booked, or the resort with the infinity pool, and escape into the holiday for months before it actually happens.

It’s the same with my garden up north, especially in the spring. There is something in my DNA that makes me automatically reach for a notebook as soon as I get a sniff of warmer weather. Not just any notebook, but my PLANNING notebook. It is ringbound, has a bright blue cover so that I can always find it in the pile of notebooks on my desk, and written inside it is every garden plan I have had for our place up north over the past five years.

This year I am writing furiously, as there is much to do.

First, I have to convert a berry house that was here when we arrived. It still contains some raspberry plants but the door has broken and there are many, many holes made by rabbits who have found the berry house an absolute joy for mid-summer feasting. I have tried numerous times to fix it up but now I’m

re-purposing. We have an old canvas cover, once used on a very large gazebo, which I figure will fit perfectly over the berry house. All I need to do is cut some kind of entry hole in it and, hey presto, I have a seedling house!

I haven’t told my husband Paul about this project yet because it involves him climbing a ladder to help me place the canvas thing over the berry house. He won’t be very enthusiastic – he won’t share my vision and will doubt its feasibility – but he’ll do it anyway because he loves me.

I also plan to stop mowing the orchard and plant it out in heaps and heaps of wildflowers the bees love. We’ll have to wade through knee-high flowers to get to any of the trees or flop into a hammock. But I am determined that my plum tree, which has only managed to produce a few plums every summer for the past three years, will be productive, and for that I need pollinators. I’ll also throw a tonne of compost in there to help everything along. I’ve told Paul about this project and he actually approves, possibly because none of it involves him.

Perhaps the most difficult project I am planning involves filling in the pond with rocks. When we arrived, there was a natural sort of swampy area, which was filled with rubbish and water. We got it cleared out and put in a nice pond. It was lovely until Flo, our gorgeous labradoodle, decided the pond made a perfect cooling-off spot and would frequently jump into it and lie down. Eventually her sharp claws put several holes in the plastic liner. I can’t find these for love nor money, so it leaks and is no longer a pond but a hole covered in black plastic.

I’ve had the brilliant idea that we can fill it with rocks, leaving some small pools so the frogs can still breed in there, which they used to do before Flo drained it. The planning for this project has so far involved the purchase of a trailer to put on the back of our quad bike. The trailer will be filled with rocks collected from other parts of our property, and these will then be dumped into the pond. The planning for this is doing my head in with delight. The research involved in finding out which plants might like to live on top of a pile of rocks with a bit of water is exhausting but exhilarating. I’ve told Paul about this project and he’s pretending he’s in favour, but we both know that I’ll get to do the fun part – driving the quad – and he’ll be the one lifting the heavy rocks into the trailer one by one.

I’m prepared for it to look hideous – he already knows it will look hideous – but the planning has been such fun.