After a week of warmth and sunshine, there’s a nip in the air and the garden has definitely gone over. As today is the autumn Equinox, it seems like a good time to share a long overdue update on our garden.

It’s been a patchy summer here in the West of Scotland, seems like we never had more than a couple of days of sunshine and warmth before being soaked by another deluge of rain. Most of the veg I sowed struggled in the cool, wet weather, though the kids have enjoyed eating peas fresh from the pod, and I’m still hopeful the tomatoes will ripen before the first frost.

Growing fruit has been much more successful. We picked bowlfuls of strawberries all through June, a handful of cherries from a dwarf tree, we got about twelve sweet and juicy plums from the Victoria plum tree, and we had enough rhubarb and apples to bake a pie (with lots of apples still to pick).

This year, we’ve let the ground along the fence grow wild, while the climbing roses, clematis and apple trees establish themselves. The long border pretty much takes care of itself, though I want to divide the geraniums and move some to the front garden. It’s been my best year for sunflowers, they grew tall and flowered despite the weather.

It’s not all been good in the garden as we’ve only seen sparrow and starling fledglings, and after noticing that we hadn’t seen the Robin or Blue Tits around for a while, we checked their nests and found both abandoned. I fear one of the neighbourhood cats either got one of the parents or scared them off as all the Tits and Robins stopped visiting the garden for a while. This loss was counterbalanced somewhat by the arrival of a hoglet that has moved in and built a nest inside the little brick house we put together for it, and appears every evening for his supper of wet cat food and hedgehog food. Watching our resident hedgehog scurry around in the evenings is more entertaining than TV.

The biggest change was removing the bamboo, which provided an excellent screen but was an environmental deadzone with nothing but a few spiders inhabiting it, and I’m planning to plant a couple of trees there instead.

Our garden is such a wild clash of ideas, but it is also the best antidote I know to the almost constant climate doomism that pervades the news. I really love seeing how excited the kids are when picking fresh food from the garden, and it’s an easy way of helping them to connect with nature and learn about so many environmental issues. It is our little haven, surprisingly calm and private, in the bustling city. Have a lovely week. X