Happy New Year....and the garden has moved

We have moved. We have sold our beloved Blanchet and bought a smaller house (4 400m2 garden) which will be better suited to us in our old age. The house is over 250 years' old and the garden is almost a blank canvas. There are 4 walnut trees, a fig tree and some more recently planted trees and shrubs. So here lies an opportunity. We have a garden to develop at our leisure, in a glorious, vineyard framed setting and I can document the process.

Meanwhile - it is cold. It reached -7C during the last couple of nights, so the garden will have had a healthy purge of pests and diseases. The scenery has been sensational with a hoar frost building up on trees, vines and grasses. Here is a photograph of our neighbour's garden which is up on a ridge to the north of us.

My bees are still at Blanchet. The new owners have kindly let me leave them there until I decide on the exact location for the apiary. You can move a bee hive less than 3 yards or more than 3 miles - but nothing in between. This is because they navigate by landmarks and if they pick up on old landmarks they will try and return to the old site of the apiary and get lost. You have to make sure you have moved them either further than they would fly on an expedition (1.5 miles, approximately) or so that the hive is close enough to the old site for them to be able to find the new hive again. So once I have put the hives in place here, it would be a lengthy process to re-site them if I felt they were in the wrong place.

Watch this space for developments........