James Hitchmough reckons that slugs will recolonise an area from surrounding locations within 5 weeks. I always enjoy this work, now that in most areas of the garden it’s less onerous after many years of rigorous zero tolerance.

Skip lorries with a full skip load can often weigh approximately 18 tonnes, this can place a lot of strain on driveways, lanes, especially when removing a full skip, please bear this in mind when choosing the skips location for loading. A few more private garden visitors to show round, and snowdrop hunt forays to keep us busy – though for the first time I’m now opting not to plant the bulbs straight out, such is the severity of the cold forecast for the end of the month running into early March. William does some bramble pulling in the copse at the bottom of cae efail, and also removes the side walls of some of the Big Bags in the veg area, so that we now have a single big bag run of about 6 bags, with no wasted space. He reminded people: “Llangadog centre in Carmarthenshire was closed in 2017 without the same level of public interest – it’s only because of your huge response the council are considering backing down. This is a peat free compost made by Cwm Environmental in Carmarthenshire South West Wales, British Made in UK.brief sessions with sunshine around noon enabled some hand pollination of both Cycamen coum and special snowdrop flowers. If we’d tackled this before Christmas, I’d have avoided so many leaves being blown off, which makes things look really tatty, and take ages to tidy up.

A single missed night when I didn’t bring in the young lettuce saw a tenth taken out, probably by a single slug.Bring compost inside to warm up prior to pricking out seedlings once the first leaves have just appeared. All in all, with a stanley fan and 400w ballast in there, all you hear is the air blowing out the back of the cabinet, no fan noise at all. Our 10mm compost is generally supplied in 40L bags and is a good general-purpose compost suitable for pots and young plants. In 2009 a change to regulations dictating how we dispose of plasterboard was implemented, this means the disposal of gypsum which is the main raw material of plasterboard could no longer be mixed with other waste materials.

The stunning weather sees me cutting our first batch of hay on Saturday, and some more on Sunday – very light growth, but wonderful to cut in proper dry conditions for once, and so much easier to handle – we just rake up into windrows, and roll these over once a day. As well as keeping a check on whether any need snowdrops need splitting and dividing, if plants show any signs of disease, they are removed and binned (not composted) asap. Merlin’s Magic Green Organic Compost Peat Free 40L Litre 10mm Soil Improver This is a peat free compost made by Cwm Environmental here in Carmarthenshire, West Wales.

We’ll update you with regular progress shots as and when, but for now it’s back to sorting out converting the horse/bunny box ready for this years events. With forecasts of even colder weather to come, and with the windy weather drying up Zelkova leaves at the bottom of Cae efail, I turned over the far side of the compost reactor and collected 4 or 5 half bags of chopped leaves using the Li Ion lawnmower. I do some more hedgerow work with the Stihl Li-ion chainsaw, cutting back side ways growing hazel rods, and also laying some along our stream boundary hedge fence. I would also like to sow parsnips and carrots directly in the new beds, but I was wondering if this would work already? The back end of the tube is ducted to the compartment where the stanley fan is with 4" flexible duct.

William and I have an intensive section forking out couch grass from the remaining section of the meadow copse to be tackled as it transforms into garden proper. In a couple of hours I manage to work through all the retyred matrix garden, and much of the Northern part of the meadow copse. On rare midday sunny occasions, I do some hand pollinating with a small artist’s brush of special snowdrops and Cyclamen coum flowers – there are almost no pollinating insects around here at this time of the year. Here we’ll opt for on site produced wood chip, from the autumnal visit of Lampeter tree services to cut back trees from close to our electricity cables. It’s probably 6 years since we did this before and in spite of being careful about leaf and mud removal, the inevitable gradual silting up over the years had made the lower half of the yard too muddy to be acceptable.Huge numbers of corms can be eaten very quickly, though the ones growing through the London Pride in this part of the garden were largely unaffected. Finding a local compost / manure supplier has not been possible as yet, so we’ll be importing into Wales from England. They couldn’t collect and dispose, so they set up these arms length companies to dispose of the waste,” he said. After weeks of waiting, I give up with vegetable sowing outside and pre-germinate lettuce, beetroot, leeks and parsnips inside on damp kitchen towel in plastic containers. I plant out a few tomato plants into the big pots in the greenhouse, then realise I should cut back engulfing nectarine and tomcot foliage, so do this and complete thinning out the nectarines.