Finally, we are in! 

In fact, we are snowed in, and have been since Tuesday. It's been an eventful week... 

Monday (moving day) was long, tiring and emotional. We had less than two hours sleep, which didn't help. Our keys were ready by 11.30am, but we were still cleaning the old house until 12.30, then needed a restorative cuppa before heading out to the wilds. The old house was doing its best to make us regret leaving.

Needless to say, the removals men had beaten us to it - they'd unloaded one van into the garage, and driven all the way back to Sheffield and back (an hour each way) to collect the lorry before we arrived. ​

The new house was cold - it's been empty for months, and the heating system was drained before Christmas. Thanks to some clever instructions over the phone from our cheery plumber, I had it working within an hour or so, but it took several days for the heat to warm the old stone walls. 

On Tuesday, the world seemed a little brighter, and we nipped to our two most local towns for supplies, then to the village for a nice cup of tea in our new favourite local cafe. 

On Tuesday afternoon, the snow set in, and we were stuck. 

On Thursday, I attempted to walk a couple of miles to the local village for milk, but had to turn back because I could barely see for the snow blowing in my eyes. A nearby farmer took pity on me and gave me some milk from his cows. He did say this was the worst weather they'd had for years so I'm hoping this is NOT usual for this time of year.

​It was so very windy that the snow had blown off the fields almost completely and formed into strange sculptural drifts, almost like waves. 

Yesterday wasn't so windy, and we did actually make it all the way to the village, although it took us over an hour. The cafe was closed (oh no!) but fortunately the pub was open, so we were able to have a nice cup of tea before heading back up the hill again. 

The people coming to fit all season tyres to our car couldn't get through the snow, and I've had to cancel all work this week as the roads are either impassable or officially closed. On the plus side, it's given us plenty of time to unpack, and we are now settling in nicely and getting into the rhythm of this strange life we've catapulted ourselves into. 

Whatever happens come spring is going to feel like a doddle compared to this. 

Finally, we have some news! 

After months and months of bureaucracy, delays, idiocy and general faffing, we have exchanged contracts and will be moving house next Monday. Eek! 

I am relieved, and daunted, and excited (and daunted again) all at once. What if we hate living in the middle of nowhere? What if I can't think of anything to do with all that land? What if the neighbours don't like us? (At least we'll be a bit further away from them I suppose). What if the car breaks down and I can't get to work, or it snows, or the well overflows or the electricity goes off? What if...? 

We're not in the habit of moving house very often (between us we have been in this house for forty years), so the slight trepidation we have about this particular house is hard to distinguish from general wibbling about moving house at all. Still, we're legally obliged to go now so we'd best just pack up and get on with it. 

Much of our stuff has been packed for months - the cellar has been full to bursting since before we put our own house on the market last July. We've now got a week to get everything out of the cellar, and the rest of our things packed. The removals firm dropped off another forty boxes today and I think we'll use them all. 

We aren't minimalists.

At the weekend, once we had a date, I packed up my tubs from the garden. They probably could have gone in the removals van, but they're difficult to stack, and would have taken up a fair bit of space (which, er, we don't have much of). So I bundled them all up and took them to a friend's house for safekeeping. 

Here they are, nestled among the snowdrops. They won't need any looking after at this time of year, and there's nothing much growing in them anyway, but it seemed a shame to leave them behind.

It felt strangely emotional packing up the garden. At this time of year it's mostly sticks, but there are a few shoots coming through and it feels odd to know I won't be seeing the chive flowers again, or the gooseberries. 

I'm pretty sure there will be plenty of times when I'll be looking back with fondness at the thought of having a tiny city garden that I could weed and prune and tidy and be finished in time for lunch...

I haven't spent much time in the garden lately. Much of October felt soggy and grey, and not really the weather for sitting outside. 

As I walked past the garden to the car though, I did notice that there were still flowers. 

Quite a lot of flowers, actually. 

I've been out and done a bit of tidying up and yes, I did wrap up and have a cup of tea out there. I'll miss this little garden when we eventually move. It's changed a lot over the years, and while I curse about its smallness and lack of privacy, it's always surprised me just how many different corners you can have in such a tiny space. 

We still have no real house news. Apparently the building society now considers our new house to be 'acceptable' (an improvement on the 'not acceptable' status it's had for the last few weeks) and are now chewing their pens and drinking their tea for a few more days before they get round to giving us an offer on Wednesday. I'm not sure how many more stages they can invent, or how much more I can stand. 

Everyone else is ready, and it seems they are keen to inform me of this fact on a regular basis. I wish I had the influence over the building society that they seem to think I have. I'm told that once we have the mortgage offer, there isn't much else to do, so theoretically we could be moving this month. 

Again, I won't hold my breath. 

In the meantime, we are picking rosemary and lavender from the garden to put in with the reduced supermarket carnations and trying to live here for just a little bit longer. 

Yes, yes, I know it's the middle of September, and the leaves are falling and it's raining and it's not really summer any more, and definitely not August, but things rather ran away with me. 

​So before we get too far away, I wanted to share these pictures from when the sun was shining (occasionally) and I was sitting outside every day. 

I don't think I really thought about it at the time, but that was (hopefully!) the last summer we'll see in this garden. I feel like I didn't really take as many pictures as I should have done, but we were caught up with the decorating, and then with people traipsing in and out, and then mired in a pit of bureaucracy. 

I did sit outside a lot though, which I'm grateful for, and while I didn't grow any veg this year, there were plenty of flowers. 

Right now we're feeling like we're engaged in an elaborate bureaucratic game, and we're not even sure what the outcome will be. There are many hurdles still to cross. We're still quibbling over the mortgage, and this week we learned that our new house has rights of way for people to shoot on our land. Shoot what? I can't imagine there's anything much more than rabbits. I'd rather they didn't. Should I be concerned? There's so much to learn.

In the meantime, we try to carry on with normal life, which is easier said than done. Weekends are better, because I know the phone won't ring, so I'm not sitting waiting for a call. People keep telling me that we'll move eventually, and I keep telling myself that plenty of other people move house all the time so it's clearly not impossible, but I won't truly believe it until we're standing on the inside holding the keys.  

I'll miss this gooseberry bush when we leave. I bought it from Poundland about eight years ago, and it looked like a stick for the first couple of years, but every summer since has grown more gooseberries than I thought possible from one small bush. 

This year they were ready just as our house was going on the market, and I kept seeing them from the window and thinking 'I really must pick those gooseberries', but the freezer was full and in the midst of painting and gluing and fixing and packing and tidying, there was really no room for making jam. 

​So they stayed outside and the birds ate some (but not many) and the rest turned slowly brown. 

Finally, the house was ready, and the viewings were done, and someone agreed to buy our house. One sunny weekend, I found myself with nothing to do (a rare occurrence), and my eye fell to the remainder of the gooseberry crop. 

Sadly, most of them had gone, but I did gather enough for a decent bit of jam 

I love making gooseberry jam. Once you get past the giant thorns, and the endless snipping of stalks, it's an easy process, and I love the way it turns from green to deep pink as it cooks. 

I wasn't planning to make any more jam this year, but one evening last week I found myself yet again with little to do, and took off for a wander round the fields. 

It was a lovely evening, and as I wandered my eye fell on... blackberries. In my head they are ready in September, and I miss them every single year. I gathered as many as I could carry (in, er, small plastic bags leftover from looking after a friend's dog the day before). Not exactly a picturesque Country Living magazine-style shot. 

I wandered into the local park, which runs down the side of a hill, and provides an excellent view. I sat on a bench to watch the sun set, and before long was joined by our dog friend, and his owners. Most jolly. 

So now we have a choice of jam, which is never a bad thing. I'm not sure how long it'll last. I've never made jam that needed to keep for very long, because we are avid jam-eaters in this house and I've never made enough to last longer than a week or two. One day I'll experiment with making enough to last the year. Probably need more than three jars though. 

And so, just like that, we have sold our house. 

Of course, it wasn't 'just like that' at all. There were tears, tantrums, endless trips to Wickes and visits to friends, and much late night tidying and sorting and painting. 

But the photographer came (and was here for hours, and made our home look beautiful), and the next day we had a for sale sign in the garden (after a brief period of it being in someone else's garden, which must have been quite alarming for them). 

Over the next week we had sixteen viewings, three offers (and several counter offers, and retracted offers, and increased counter offers), and eventually we said yes. And of course, as soon as we did, someone jumped back in with a higher price. We said no - we're retaining some shred of sanity by acting as much as we can with good manners and integrity. 

It's a strange thing, having people wander round your house. I thought I'd feel judged, but by the time it went up for sale, it really didn't feel like our house any more. We've made so many changes (and I will share some of them), and packed away so many things, that it feels more like a holiday cottage. 

On the first day of viewings the sun shone obligingly, and even I couldn't quite believe how well the house looked. The third person to view went straight to the estate agents and offered, and it was her offer we accepted in the end (after much to-ing and fro-ing between us and with other people - I've never had so many phone calls in my life).

Of course, nothing is ever straightforward. Our buyer has to sell her house before she can buy ours, and we've given her quite a short deadline (I'm confident she can do it!) And we, having finally put ours up for sale after finding our dream house, have decided that the location of our dream house may not be quite as idyllic as the house itself. 

We've found an alternative, but it needs a lot of work. A two hundred year old cottage in a national park, with peeling wallpaper, mouldy carpets and a slightly precarious roof. And a greenhouse, woodland, outbuildings and a beautiful view. 

We've put in an offer, and are keeping our fingers crossed. 

Our searching has taken us to many beautiful places. This is a big move for us, and we want to be as sure as we can about the place we move to. We spend our weekends wandering between cafes and poking around potential new houses as much as we dare, and after work we sometimes drive out and just sit and listen. We've learned a lot doing this, but it's actually a nice activity in its own right. 

In the meantime, I've been pottering in the garden. My efforts have been focused on the house these last few months, and outside the raspberries have died and the willow is reaching for the telephone wires. But at the last minute I spent a small fortune on bedding plants, and with the lavender, the fuchsia, and the redcurrants, the garden looked as beautiful as the house. 

Once we'd accepted an offer, we breathed a sigh of relief, closed the door, and life started to return to some vague kind of normality (albeit still with a lot of phone calls from the estate agent - I'll miss those guys when this is all over). On Sunday, I picked some of the remaining gooseberries, and sat de-stalking them in the garden ready for making jam. 

I haven't actually got round to making that jam yet, and the gooseberries are now in the freezer. I remembered that I do, in fact, have a full time job, and rather inconveniently that has required me to do a fair bit of travelling these last few weeks. Just this week I've spent over 20 hours on trains and buses. I'm tired. 

But we're getting there. This waiting is hard, but being able to sit still makes a nice change from painting and plastering and gluing and sticking. At least while we wait we can drink tea, and see friends, and rest. And, of course, investigate questions like 'are you allowed to replace metal framed windows in a national park?' and 'just how much does it cost to put in a new heating system?' I'm going to know so many things when all this is over. 

I'll miss this little garden when we leave. I might look back at pictures from when I first moved here and see how far we've come. It feels like it looks after itself now (apart from the willow), and now I have a bit more time, I can just sit out there and read. 

Our new garden, if all goes to plan, will be much bigger, and no doubt I'll be marvelling and cursing in equal measure about that. But for now, I'll just sit and wait, with as much patience as I can muster. 

I didn't spend much time in the garden in April. Between a work conference, my cycling trip and our week in Northumbria, I was away for almost three weeks of April, and the rest I seemed to spend packing and unpacking and repacking, and preparing to go away and getting used to being home again. 

I did sneak out to take a few photographs in the sunshine right at the end of April though. Things have taken a rather tulipy turn out there. When my mum visited in the autumn, we spent a rather chilly couple of hours haphazardly planting bulbs, and our lack of planning and coordination is very evident. 

Tulips have popped up all over the place - pink, bright red and frilly, and these rather fetching dark purple raggedy-edged things. 

I often think I should take a more coordinated approach to garden planning, and have some kind of vague colour scheme that I stick to, but this is such a small garden that you can't commit to too much of one thing in case it doesn't work, so every year I end up with a slightly different higgledy piggledy look. It suits me. The neighbours may well laugh, I don't care. 

We harvested a small bit of rhubarb in April too - just enough to top up a crumble with the rest being from a friend's allotment. The gooseberry, redcurrant and blackcurrant bushes are looking like they're in for a good summer, and the first flower has appeared on the fuchsia. I've finally pulled up the ornamental cabbages, which went to seed several weeks ago, but the bedding plants (violas?) I planted last August are still going strong, although they're starting to get a bit leggy now. A trip to the garden centre might be in order soon. 

I can't believe I haven't done a garden update since December, but I suppose it's not surprising really as I've barely been out there. Partly, it's been cold and rainy and dark, and not much has been growing, and we've been focusing on the inside of the house. 

This weekend though, the sun came out, and we finally cleared a path to the front door and opened it for the first time this year (I mean, we have been out of the house in that time, we just use the back door as our main means of escape).  

The garden hasn't been quite as neglected as you might think - because it runs alongside the pavement I do pull out the odd weed or bit of litter as I'm passing to get into the car. But that's not the same as being in the garden I don't think. 

Yet again, I was impressed by these winter pansies, which have lasted since August, which is seven months now. That's pretty impressive, and they've just got more and more abundant throughout the winter. 

The ornamental cabbage have gone to seed, but I've left them for now as I think they look quite sculptural (and also I have nothing to replace them with).

Signs of spring are peeking through though. That's my only daffodil that you can see above. My mum helped me plant what felt like a thousand crocus bulbs last winter, but so far only these at the bottom of the apple tree have emerged. 

I love their delicate purple stripiness and their thin stripey leaves. 

The tulips are making progress, although no flowers yet. And other signs of spring have started to surprise me, like this hyacinth that I'd clearly shoved into a pot outside the back door after it had flowered inside last year (or even the year before). 

Some things are looking a little worse for wear. These pansies have clearly been munched - I suspect by a slug slithering past on its way to the nearby compost bin. I need to put them back outside the back door actually - they were moved when I neighbour had scaffolding round their house before Christmas and are now tucked away in the shade of the lilac, which isn't an ideal place for them. 

Every year I think I've killed the rhubarb (and the fuchsia, but I've no evidence for the contrary on that yet this year so we'll have to wait and see). However, it seems I'm wrong - rhubarb is wending its wrinkly way up through the lavender.  

Speaking of lavender... I never did get round to harvesting it at the end of last year, and it was looking rather woody and gangly. It started drizzling while I was out in the garden, but I did manage to pull the woodiest stems off this and it now looks considerably more tidy. 

So there we are - a little peek round my garden on this, the spring equinox, when the day and night are equal length and we start, slowly, to inch our way towards summer. 

How's your garden looking? 

It's been cold and frosty out there this week, but I was delighted to see that the bulbs we planted before Christmas have started to come through. 

At least I *think* they're the bulbs we planted - there's a small chance they may be unharvested garlic. We'll see. Whatever they are, it's nice to see some new greenery out there and it's making me feel like spring is on the horizon (however distant). 

I've also been delighted with these autumn bedding plants, which are still going strong despite the frost. 

I suppose it's probably pretty sheltered out there - the edge of the garden is only a few feet from the house, and we're in a built up urban area so maybe it just doesn't get that cold. Whatever the reason, the tubs are looking positively lush, not bad for Christmas week. 

I've got high hopes for this giant poppy - I thought I'd killed it in the summer but having planted it in the ground (rather than a pot) it now looks like it'll soldier through. I wonder if we'll still be here to see it flower... 

I've never grown ornamental cabbages before - I always thought they were a bit pointless, when you could just grow a real cabbage and make a nice meal out of it. But then I didn't grow any real cabbages, and these ornamental ones take up very little room and have been a great source of purpleness, especially now when much of the rest of the garden is full of sticks. I'll definitely have them again. 

They're ever so frilly and delicate, and such a beautiful colour. Looks like I won't have too much of a problem making the garden look inhabitable to sell the house in February after all. 

I'd love to hear what's going on in your garden if you're willing to share - feel free to post a link to pictures if you have them! 

October was mild, and the garden looked very much like it did in September, but, if anything, the flowers were even more lush. November has been a little more varied. We've had some lovely sunny days, but a fair bit of wind and rain, and the trees are fast losing their leaves, and the garden is starting to look a little forlorn, as it so often does at this time of year. 

We had our first frost, closely followed by our first small flurry of snow this month. 

Not much, and it didn't stay for long, but it was definitely a reminder of things to come. 

I'm surprised at the number of flowers that are holding on. The fucshia is always the last to lose its colour (although it's looking increasingly sparse now), but even the violas are hanging in there. I've been very impressed with them. 

We're planning to sell our house in early February, when the garden is at its worst, and last year was nothing but sticks. Not ideal, but it's such a small space that I don't think the garden will be a deal breaker anyway. We have evergreen herbs now, and I'll get some early spring bedding plants into the pots. I've just acquired a pile of bulbs too, all kinds of things that should flower from early spring through to early summer, resulting in a bit of a riotous display. I must get out and plant those this weekend, before it snows again.