First active visit to the plot, having read on the RHS website last night that I needed to get on and prune the apple and pear trees. I read all kinds of articles about it, but it still doesn’t really make your own tree match the diagram particularly well at any point. The pear doesn’t seem to have had any great new growth and neither have many fruit buds showing. Well, they’ve both had a haircut, so we’ll see what happens. The plum tree has to wait until summer, as it’s more prone to disease in the cuts.

The big elder in the corner has had a bit of a trim too – one branch was making the pear tree lopsided and another kept poking Mum in the head. We saw a mouse disappearing under one of the plastic sheets and noticed a path through the grass from one sheet to another – where we’d seen evidence of a nest one time before when replacing the plastic.

It’s a bit windy down there and a little squelchy-sounding under foot, but it feels like I can start going down there and doing some of the cutting down that I didn’t do in the autumn. The digging of the big bed will still have to wait a while, but at least it’s been in the dark all this time. Trouble is, I’m not sure the docks under there care particularly.