
With the end of meteorological winter is less than a couple of weeks away this is my last chance to complete some of the seasonal tasks in the garden. There’s no shortage of tidying up jobs such as weeding veg beds and clearing paths but they can wait. More urgently, I need to trim this corner of the hawthorn/holly hedge to more manageable proportions before the birds start nesting.

It won’t be long before the frogs gather to spawn in the pond again, so I’d like to clear out some of the duckweed, overgrown plants and fallen leaves before they return.

To give our autumn-fruiting raspberries the best chance I want to dig them up before growth gets started again, raise the level of the raised bed with riddled compost, replant them and finally cut them down to ground level.

There’s more cutting back needed behind the shed too before birds, such as our resident dunnocks, start nesting.