Sometimes you find yourself in a rut. Doing the same things at the same time and limiting your horizons by long-standing expectations. Sometimes however it does you good to break out of this reverie and challenge your “norm”.  Only then will you realise that things don’t have to be the same year in year out and changes can be made if  you free your mind of its rusting shackles and have the courage to do something different.

My “norm” is looking forward to a spring and summer in a garden full of surfinia hanging baskets, traditional bright annual bedding plants and the ever reliable perennials annuals dotted around the borders. I love my garden and get great pleasure from nurturing these young plants from seedlings to full-blown blousy glory in the summer months.

But, this weekend it will be welly time and I will be moving my beloved perennials and shrubs from my back garden into my front garden and preparing my back garden to become an eclectic mix of herbs, vegetables, and old fashioned annuals which complement the self-sufficiency. (Hubby doesn’t know yet but I’ve just ordered some railway sleepers to form the retaining walls needed to complete the job)

Hubby too has a patch of garden on which he grows vegetables every year. He does a great job with cultivating bags and bags of potatos, tomatoes, cucumbers etc but he grows everything in rows…..how boring.

My new garden will be far more higgledy-piggledy with a heady mix of bright courgettes-en-fleur, pumpkins, sweetpeas entwined amongst the runner bean wigwams, marigolds to ward off the wee beasties and swathes of lavender, lemon balm and  monarda to encourage the bees and butterflies to swarm and flutter around the teasles and nasturtiums. I am also relying on the numerous frogs and our hedgehog family to complete this idyll by eating all the slugs.

That’s the plan. So let work begin……