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I did it! I gardened!

I had a trusty team of helpers of course. Two volunteers who till now have spent most of their volunteer hours charming visitors in our centre, and three volunteers from a local day resource centre. Beween us, we have revealed a good deal of earth and I even got stuck in with the loppers and bow-saw!

A seventh helper however, only made his presence known after a fair bit of mud had been shifted - what a shirker! - and even then he kept a discreet distance. He still managed to steal the lime-light by hopping in at the last second and picking up a worm...

It was a robin! A beautiful bright and very autumnal robin keeping a very beady eye on all the activity. If there's one bird that really sums up the relationship between gardening and nature, I think it would be him.

As part of Feed the Birds Day, members of the public helped us plant a lavender hedge and honeysuckle to climb under our veranda to attract wildlife such as birds and bees next year. As the Homes for Wildlife website suggests, feeding birds with kitchen scraps seeds and peanuts at this time of year is vital, but planting up for the future in this way is totally sustainable (and, rather pretty!)

So get digging. Who knows, you might - like me - find a small brown bird with a red breast keeping you company througout the day!

Unfortnuately our plans to get down and dirty have been scuppered for this week due to the terrible weather on Tuesday when my trusted helpers were due to come in. However, it did give me and a couple of volunteers the chance to go and investigate the site further to see what was already there, and how we would go about revealing the bare bones of the garden.

I learnt plenty of new things, in particular that pulling up 'convolvulus' (long weed with distinctive white flowers) is not actually that hard, and planning flower borders relies more on common sense than anything else (tall plants at back, short at front).

We have plenty of marjoram (a herb) growing wildly accross the site that we will salvage, and a whole load of other things that just look and smell nice that must want to be here.

So with luck, next week we will be weed free and raring to go.