After a fairly prolonged period of illness, I am finally starting to feel well enough to continue with the garden restoration as well as pick up where we left off with the plans for an extension.

This year we have had reasonable success with the pumpkin squashes Crown Prince and Galeux d'Eysines

Pumpkins and squashes are some of the easiest vegetables to grow, once you understand their (relatively simple) requirements; They need a relatively long growing season but are sensitive to frost. This means that they need sowing in March or early April under glass or on a windowsill, at Darncombe this is well before the risk of frost has passed and as a result the seedlings will need protecting in the greenhouse until it is safe to plant them out; They are relatively large plants with a tendency spread widely so I have created a space to allow for this.They love really rich moist soil and after levelling an area to create a large area easy to maintain we had a rather poor area of soil. As I was generating plenty of hedge trimmings and green waste I dug some shallow trenches keeping the top soil to one side and filled the trenches with the coarse green and woody waste. replacing the topsoil over this created a number of small ridges. it is my intention to build on these ridges with layers of compost in a "no dig" manner to build the value of this rather poor area of heavy clay soil.