I haven’t posted many garden photos recently as the weather has been a bit miserable – dank and dismal!! However the last few days have been cold, crisp, sunny days, we’ve been waking up to a beautiful hoar frost which coats every leaf and every blade of grass so it looks like it’s been dusted with icing sugar. We live in the lea of a hill called the Chevin, so from early November to mid February we get no direct sunshine, it makes it quite a frost pocket, so even with a bit of sunshine, the frost stayed all day. These photos were taken mid afternoon…

As you can see I’ve not got very far with the autumn tidy-up! I’m a fair-weather gardener, before it was too wet, now it’s far to cold!! I’ll just have to stay in side and sew!

Every blade of grass has a thick white coating…

…Rosie thinks that makes for a great place to roll!!

I bought this bird bath earlier this year – it’s been hidden beind the irises until now. The two bird ornaments came with it, they look quite cute with all the frost.

The roses are ever hopeful, they’re still producing buds, though they soon turn to brown with the cold and wet.

These two shrubs are in the autumn bed, the lower one is a euonymus and the top one is an erysimum, only the euonymus is actually variegated!

I think the pots corner has a frost pocket all of it’s own with a frost pocket!! It seemed extra thick here!!

Our hot compost bin arrived over the weekend. This is our main Christmas present to each other! We were keen to start so we followed the instructions on mixing the starter stuff with shreddings and twigs and added a plastic container of boiling water – it acts like a hot water bottle! Unfortunately I think we’ve picked the wrong weekend to start it off as it’s struggling to stay above 40 degrees!We’ll see how it goes and give it another boost when the weather warms up a bit.

Our bird feeding station has been very busy in the cold weather with a pair of nuthatches, blue tits, great tits and bull finches.