I do apologise for being absent from this blog for almost exactly a year. There have been many reasons, including computer hardware issues and other practical problems, but the truth is slightly simpler. As some of you may know, my latest book (A Fenland Garden) is about the same topic as 99% of the posts in this blog – and I know it seems obvious to me now, but you can sometimes flog a topic to death. So by December 23rd, 2023 I had lost the will to share my gardening thoughts with anyone, including myself. It was all a bit odd. But there was something else that was even odder: although my gardening thoughts were few and far between, I hadn’t lost the will to continue using my trowel, spade or fork. I removed weeds by the barrowful and harvested one of the best crops of winter vegetables I can recall. Eventually things returned to normal and for several months now I have resumed thinking about life and the garden as things that are worth writing about. I may even have detected that there might be an idea for a new book lurking in some dark recess within my brain.

I’d like to end this post on an optimistic note, but sadly I can’t and it isn’t just because the political world is going mad as it lurches towards the hard right. No, the dark forces in our garden have four legs and long bushy tails. We are besieged by hundreds of grey squirrels which attack our bird-feeders and do horrendous damage in the vegetable garden, as these two pictures confirm. They were both taken on the 6th of February, 2024 and show how squirrels had munched their way up Brussels sprouts’ stalks, eating all the leaves and sprouts. This attack took just two days. I wouldn’t mind quite so much if the attackers had been native red squirrels. But even so, I still can’t bring myself to kill any greys. Am I being pathetic? Quite possibly, but then that’s also gardening life.