A sunny and cold start today, we are going to have a week of this sort of weather; freezing at night and not much more than 3 Celsius during the day. No chance of digging over the vegetable garden just yet; it’s frozen solid. So too the water in the troughs in the courtyard. I was trying to pick the leaves off the protective layer until I realised they were iced in.

I started the day by picking up the leaves in the courtyard to warm up. Luckily there doesn’t seem to have been much wind in the past few days. The leaves just plummeted from the tree directly below. It made picking them up a lot easier. And I had a haul of seven bags.

Now I could have just hoiked them onto the compost pile, but having read so much about the wonders of composted leaves (wait two years) as a soil conditioner I have decided to go down the patient route. The trick is to hide them. And they are a bit exposed right now. Curse winter for exposing all the ‘bones’ of the garden. I will either have to plant a large patch of Euphorbia here, or just get on with the shade garden plan and put the larger of the shade loving perennials in front of the bags.

I found some frozen raspberries up at the top potager – quite fun to eat them cold, and brought down some red curly kale for lunch.

Spent a bit of time putting up some bubble wrap in the potting shed; some of the stipas are a bit wind blasted but they haven’t suffered as much as I feared. And I managed to try and put up the pictures more permanently. Staple guns so much fun.

Need to plant some bulbs. The ground is defrosting and when the sun comes out it’s lovely.

I am waddling like the Michelin man: too many layers. But deserving of lunch. I have planted two New Dawn rose bushes; one in the artichoke bed and the other just under the down pipe (broken) at the edge of the house. Hopefully it will grow up and around the corner of the house and meet the other New Dawn roses on the west side. One of the bushes is still flowering which is not bad for this time of year. And hopefully the scent will be more apparent as they get established.

I also put in thirty narcissus bulbs just in front of the potting shed. (Had to remove one of the bright blue water troughs to plant them. But that’s fine. The blue bins are such a garish unrelenting colour they really won’t fit in with any planting scheme.

The sweet peas are coming up well: a bit spindly in the low light, but at least they have germinated.

And I may even mow the lawn after lunch. It’s dry enough to work now. And it will be the last mow before spring. Here’s hoping I can a) get it started and b) not get carried away. There is a vegetable garden to dig over – I keep re-iterating that.

Oh yes, and I planted three more thyme shrubs in the path down the steps. More challenging as there are plenty of rocks on this side. But when you have a mania for symmetry, then the path is crying out for more thyme. And they were only 2 euros each at Jacquet. Half the price they are in the summer. I guess everyone thinks you are mad to plant in this cold weather. Hah.

Excuse me while I attend to our radiators. They shudder and sings merrily and you have to catch them before they all set each other off.

So here it is. The mower started second go, and went like a demon down all the lawns. Took ages, but it’s such a pleasure (if you discount having to stop and empty the grass catcher all the time. I’m not strong enough to un-wrench the blade attachment and put on the mulching mechanism, so I have to keep on with this rather laborious task).

And there are two parts of the garden where the new lawns are ‘taking’ well. I sowed a lot of grass seeds around the soft fruit bushes. You can almost see the join between the turf path and the newly seeded bit, but it’s a close thing. Very impressive work on the part of the grass. And who would have thought that the ‘piano’ lawn would have seeded in that rain last month? Almost a green sward.

And to finish the day I went up and applied yet more shrouding to the shed. It blows a gale in there and we have about three more days of frost predicted ahead. But when the sun shines its bliss and if all goes well I shall try and dig over parts of the vegetable bed tomorrow. (Promise.)

But before I went in, I had to take a picture of the Agastache dying so elegantly in the garden. Why it’s positively Piet Oudolf-like having plants like this backlit by the afternoon sun in winter. It will make a New Planting Style gardener of me yet.

Well the forest creatures are creeping ever down the mountain when the weather turns. The cheeky deer were eating figs off the tree when I came up the drive today. Broad daylight and having a wonderful time. I spooked two of them and they shot off into the forest, but still. Good thing I made my pots of fig jam before they scoffed the lot.

I only had about ten minutes in the garden when I arrived. Just time to heel in the fruit trees I bought near Valence this afternoon (a nectarine and an apricot) to keep them safe until I dig holes to plant them properly, and grab some vegetables. But in the failing light I can see that Nicolas seems to have almost finished the wall. Hopefully he will have a flurry this week and get the steps started too. I imagine I have just about exhausted my advance money I lent him for his tractor which is a shame. I’d love a garden slave for the winter. But failing anyone else, it will have to be me.

And here it is: didn’t take as long as I feared. And it was so much fun. I suspect I have gone a bit wonky down by the olive trees below the house. But I suspect I won’t be so fussy as to go back and obsessively remeasure. The east garden didn’t fit onto the page, so it has to be relegated to the next sheet. It looks rather long and thin. But at least it all shows potential.

I was going to go out to the photocopy shop to get it reduced and remove that dodgy line down the right hand side of the house. But it is teeming down and I am reluctant to get wet.

Yesterday’s long trip up and down to Newcastle produced more results. Here is my first draft of the shade garden planting scheme.

Sticking on the little pink circles was marvellous fun. I tried drawing the plants and ended up squishing all the plants into the corners and leaving a gaping hole in the middle of the bed. It’s eight metres long and about three and a half metres wide at the central point, so there will be a lot of swapping and sorting when I actually have the plants on the blank canvas. Wish it was going to just as easy to buy the plants, grow some from seed, create enough weed suppressing bark chip mulch and actually get the flowers into the ground.

Off to visit a garden tomorrow: Waterperry Gardens in Oxfordshire, so that may inspire. And I am hoping they have some bare root fruit trees that are not so large I will have to send them unaccompanied luggage on the train.

And a belated thank you to Sarah for telling me the closest colour of the olives from our trees. Cadmium green light. And that reminds me, have to give them the daily change of salty water. Tedious task, but not as bad as other jobs in the fruit garden.

Sunshine at last. Waking up this morning I vowed to spend the day mostly outdoors as Thursday felt like house arrest: painted all day. Did not step one foot outdoors for the entire day. And here is the result.

First task of the lovely sunny Friday was to plant up the four little olive trees I bought from the large St Péray garden centre Jaquet on Wednesday. They were in the sale section of the huge nursery; a snap at three euros each (Olea europa Cipressino). And I found some more small pots of the sedum Autumn Joy and a few plants of the Anemone Honorine Jobert variety, which I am sure will go well in the shade garden. No design yet or planting plan, but I’m reading and pondering and making tentative lists.

I thought the little olives (variety, promises to be able to withstand the cold) would do well next to the large established olive tree down below the plum trees in front of the house. There is a bank just made for it; here is the before shot. And in went the trees. Rich and lovely soil. All soft from the endless days of rain. Naturally this is going to be a devil to keep weed free in the spring. I hope I come up with the solution before the strimmer has to penetrate the usual thicket. I did put down a mulch of river stones directly around the trees. but will need to either mulch with more stones later, or put down some weed proof fabric. Wheeling up to the small stone store at the end of the property brought back memories of hauling stones in September, but luckily it didn’t take long.

I used the excavated soil from the olives as fill in behind the wall at the pool. There is a rather vast amount of soil that needs to be added to this wall area before we get the grasses planted up. I had hoped that falling chestnut burrs and leaves would build up the levels but there is about a foot of soil to go.

Lots of trudging of the heavy wheel barrow up across the lawn. Nicolas was busy building the little retaining wall in the sunshine. Note the t-shirt in this early November day.

And I found myself peeling layers of fleeces and hats as the day went on. Especially as there was wood to bring down from the top of the property and into the Calabert. Most impressive amount of wood now that the stack has been built.

As I was trudging I noticed that the olive tree below the house is still full of fruit; out came the ladder and up I went a-harvesting. There is now a whopping two kilograms of the fruit ready for me to soak in brine for weeks and weeks. One day we will hopefully have a bumper harvest large enough to press. Home grown olive oil. Who would ever imagine it high up on a mountain in the Ardèche.

Up in the potting shed (which is getting crowded already) the garlic is coming along nicely. I really need to think about getting them into the ground at the end of the month. But that will involve digging over a quadrant of the lower vegetable garden and it is still sloshily wet.

I have done a little plan of the future rotation of vegetables for 2009. It’s fun to see how simple it is compared to this year’s ambitious artistic attempt. (The drawing is tiny, but I’m obsessed with small note paper at the moment.) Bernard finished four more cloches today (only with three curved struts which may be a bit risky in high winds) so there will be six cloches for all the vegetables to hide under. Imagine; no more cabbages peppered by cabbage moth butterfly larvae, salads unmunched by Daisy, and Swiss chard extant all through the season. Speaking of which, the slugs in this incredibly wet weather have appeared. I found a few living under the weed proof fabric below the winter cloche. That will be next year’s drama; if the pests don’t’ come from above ground, they will come from below.

Leaving for a few weeks is hard: the stipa grasses are safe so far in the shed, but will they suffer from a cold snap? And with all this blazing sunshine it’s hell to go away. I wish I could get up into the potting shed flower garden and dig over the soil; move the sedums grown from seed, and weed, weed, weed. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have that side of the shed as clear and lovely as the other?

I did have fun measuring the east garden and the bits that I have missed from the original scale drawing of the property. Ate three figs I found still on the tree as I was whizzing past with measuring line (marked off at every five metres), tape measure, paper and pencil with odd figures and diagrams. I have promised myself to make an updated garden plan by the end of the month. Watch this space.

Well goodbye snowy scene and hello storms. We have had days of tree bending gusts of wind that have driven us indoors and pelting rain. The beams are coming along nicely – but naturally it’s the garden that draws my interest. I don’t have any action photographs of the trees dancing in the storm. But the apple tree found itself at a rather rakish angle after all the wind died down.

At least the leaves have been ‘cleared’ from the courtyard. In fact I keep finding mulberry leaves all over the property in the most unlikely places. The rosemary bush is most decorated. And I even found them all over the shade garden. As if I didn’t have enough leaves to clear up underneath the chestnut monster. Here is the final process. Two days work but so attractive now. And full of promise. These really are blank canvasses crying out for some design and some plants.

I will take more photos when it stops raining. One things we did manage to do before the storms struck was to collect olives from the tree just in front of the house. Amazingly green. One always imagines olives to be, well olive. But these little luminous orbs are definitely off the spectrum. I will have to ask Sarah what colour they actually are. I need to soak them in brine for a few weeks, so will take them back to London with me on Saturday.

There were a few of my specialty grasses lurking under the weeds around the trial beds of the potting shed. Growing well as they have had so much water. But they are in the wrong spot. So up they came and I have dotted them around the next unstable bank that is crying out for some knitting and binding of roots. There are a few verbena bonariensis plants here on this terrace as well. Not sure how they will survive the winter, or even self sow. But it’s still an experimental part of the garden.

But the big creative part of the garden yesterday was the start of the potting shed terracing. Poor Nicolas couldn’t work on his wall as the weather was so inclement and the cement wasn’t happy. And he couldn’t make a start on the important stone steps down to the pool shed either. The ground is so sodden and shifting right now. We need a week of nice dry and lovely cool weather for more of that heavy lifting to get done. In the meantime he has made a start on the terrace. I was nearby hauling wood from the forest so had time to actually take some action photographs of the work in progress.

It’s a simple design, head up to the woods and find a good straight chestnut trunk. Drag it back. Thwack in some stakes; and then fill in the bank with some well dug soil (that was my contribution). This is a work in progress, and I will take more photographs so you can see the detail. They are actually quite large beds. So more work there then. And then the heavens opened and creative play was suspended for the day. Still managed another hour and a half of wood hauling. But that doesn’t take more than a strong back, a wheelbarrow, a raincoat and a determination to get all the wood in before dark.