Heading for the hills - taking my three children away from all they know...

One of my favourite quotes from Shakespeare in love is when Shakespeare is lying in reverie and talking about his new love to Philip Henslowe the owner of the theatre played by Geoffrey Rush.  'Is she a woman of property?' he asks. 'Yes, she hath a cottage ' he says with deep admiration.  Indeed if you have visited Stratford you will have seen the brown signs to Ann Hathaway's cottage. Well at last I am a woman of property as I hath a cottage but even more excitingly ...I hath a meadow and a piece of woodland.

Symptoms seem to be excessive worry about nutrification and anyone fiddling in ‘my’ meadow that’s not me.  All the grass in the garden and the various patches of lawn we have were growing in an unchecked manor. And since we have quite a few areas for unkept exuberance both Mr McGregor and me decided to find a local company to do a mow. But while I wasn’t paying attention MrMG asked them to cut a path through the meadow… my meadow. An ok idea except they didn’t collect the grass, so there were rivulets of clippings on the ground. This sent me into a spin…as these will decay and nutrify in patches the magnificent meadow. Species diversity arises for porosity. In poor soils less aggressive and rarer plants get a chance to grow.  So I found my self frantically scooping up these cuttings and putting them in the hedge in a sacrificial pile.  It took ages and new scrapping kept on coming to light. They may look like inoffensive dried remains but they are not! Then second time th...