Everything is really growing now at the Walled Garden now, and the area is really starting to shape up. But our friends at Grow For Life won’t be changed by their new found fame…

We rolled up to the the site on this reasonably fine bank holiday Monday morning - it’s a garden fresh from having gained national TV exposure on the previous Friday’s Gardeners World - only to be totally grounded in the real world, in that someone has dumped a massive pile of gravel right in the middle of the entrance gate.

This was the Big Help Out - various volunteers, not just GoodGym this time, we’re congregating to get a whole bunch of heavy maintenance tasks done.

For the first half of the session, the tasks included:

• finally taking up a whole heap of plastic matting that’s been covering the lower half of the plot since we laid it about a year ago!

• performing any weeding on this half of the site. The matting has done most of its job - only a very few super-hardy brambles were still ticking along under there

• taking some of that gravel pile and build up an entry path to the polytunnel - Meyrick suggested that in order to “mouse proof” a door frame, you want a gap under the door of less than a biro width, and we really went to town on minimising that gap to the nearest couple of millimetres!

• spreading the rest of the gravel over the site entrance area

Then we stopped for a nice tea break, where Wayne (fame hasn’t gone to his head yet) showed us the detailed plan for the site - which some of us had had a sneak preview on the telly on Friday. Before back to work for:

• chopping and prepping a bunch of nettles to make a “nitrogen bomb” to start off a new 18-day compost heap (as seen on TV)

• constructing some new planting beds on the nearly uncovered lower site. Involved lots of wheelbarrowing, compost, and some of the cardboard we’d put to one side a few months back

• putting bark chips around the new beds

All in all a lovely morning in this newly famous Newton-St-Loe garden.