We have a new member of the Yewfield family

date calender icon Posted on Saturday 12th August 2023

There is a spring in our step

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 16th April 2023

For those of you following our blog our apologies for taking the winter off…

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The Solstice Blues

date calender icon Posted on Wednesday 22nd June 2022

The fullness and excitement of spring, of lush green leaf and flower, is beginning to wane.

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Borrowed Days

date calender icon Posted on Thursday 7th April 2022

Back to work

date calender icon Posted on Saturday 12th February 2022

After a winter break on the blog and some slow time for us gardeners…

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Winter work

date calender icon Posted on Saturday 12th February 2022

After a winter break on the blog and some slow time for us gardeners…

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Winter at Yewfield

date calender icon Posted on Saturday 12th February 2022

After a winter break on the blog and some slow time for us gardeners, its time to get back to work.

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Storm Arwen

date calender icon Posted on Monday 6th December 2021

Storm Arwen has left a trail of devastation in its wake here in South Cumbria.

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The season has turned

date calender icon Posted on Friday 1st October 2021

Summer plenty

date calender icon Posted on Thursday 5th August 2021

In the last fortnight we took off 161 bales from our species rich hay meadows.

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Flaming June

date calender icon Posted on Monday 28th June 2021

The Yewfield garden and meadows are full of colour right now.

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How is your dawn chorus?

date calender icon Posted on Tuesday 11th May 2021

Until a few days ago we had started to wonder what was happening to the dawn chorus.

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Landmarks

date calender icon Posted on Monday 5th April 2021

Change is coming

date calender icon Posted on Tuesday 2nd February 2021

The Woodland Trust have kindly given us 150 trees to plant…

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The Holly and the Ivy

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 3rd January 2021

Grey squirrels: A Conservation Dilemma?

date calender icon Posted on Monday 26th October 2020

‘Squirrels are bastards’. Those are the surprising words at the start of Alys Fowler’s gardening article…

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Green Grow the Rushes O

date calender icon Posted on Tuesday 6th October 2020

Looking forward

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 6th September 2020

We’ve been putting tracks and paths through Sawrey Ground Plantation.

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Native vs non native: both please

date calender icon Posted on Monday 20th July 2020

It’s that pink and purple moment

date calender icon Posted on Monday 15th June 2020

What extraordinary spring weather

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 10th May 2020

Every cloud has a silver lining

date calender icon Posted on Friday 17th April 2020

Forest restoration at Yewfield

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 29th December 2019

The crab apple outside the conservatory is a larder for birds right now.

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The glory of Autumn

date calender icon Posted on Thursday 31st October 2019

After weeks of rain we have finally been blessed with some dry, cool, sunny, quintessentially autumn weather.

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What a treat

date calender icon Posted on Wednesday 31st July 2019

Flaming June? Flamin’ eck!

date calender icon Posted on Friday 14th June 2019

This time last year we were bathed in glorious warmth and sunshine.

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Is our garden wildlife at risk?

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 26th May 2019

‘We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’

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Spring has sprung

date calender icon Posted on Monday 29th April 2019

Come on spring!

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 17th March 2019

Winter or Spring?

date calender icon Posted on Monday 25th February 2019

With record-breaking winter temperatures of 20.6 degrees in Wales today …

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A New Year brings new life to Yewfield

date calender icon Posted on Thursday 17th January 2019

As we welcome in 2019 what better way to bring in the New Year than by planting trees.

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Forest lore

date calender icon Posted on Monday 24th December 2018

There has been a lot of coverage about forests on radio programs recently.

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November leaves

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 11th November 2018

The rain has cleared and sunlight brings colour to the hillside across the valley.

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Season of mists and autumn fruitfulness

date calender icon Posted on Monday 27th August 2018

What a summer!

date calender icon Posted on Monday 30th July 2018

As I look across my writing table at a fresh bouquet of sweet peas…

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What a spring we are having

date calender icon Posted on Tuesday 12th June 2018

What a spring we are having! The dry and continental weather goes on and on….

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Timings

date calender icon Posted on Tuesday 24th April 2018

Timing is critical in spring not only for a gardener but also in nature.

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On the Cusp

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 25th March 2018

Winter musings

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 25th February 2018

For the love of trees

date calender icon Posted on Tuesday 26th December 2017

After watching Judi Dench’s delightful portrait of trees at her home in Surrey on the telly…

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The gardening year begins

date calender icon Posted on Tuesday 28th November 2017

As we near the end of the B and B season here at Yewfield we enter the beginning of the gardening year.

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Seasonal change

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 8th October 2017

As October roared in on the back of the first autumnal gales …

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Order returns to the garden

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 27th August 2017

August has turned out to be the coolest and wettest in 25 years up here in the Lake District.

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Midsummer blues

date calender icon Posted on Monday 31st July 2017

We are in the middle of a rather typical Lake District summer…

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A pollinators paradise

date calender icon Posted on Saturday 1st July 2017

An Ecologist visits Yewfield

date calender icon Posted on Monday 29th May 2017

Last week we walked through the land with the ecologist Mike Douglas from South Lakes Ecology.

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Clever bits of kit

date calender icon Posted on Monday 24th April 2017

A case for Sycamore

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 19th March 2017

Over the past couple of weeks we have been planting a variety of trees to diversify…

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Winter work

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 12th February 2017

Apologies for the gap in the blog entries as I have been in Canada celebrating my mom’s 90th birthday.

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Red squirrels at Yewfield

date calender icon Posted on Monday 2nd January 2017

2016 ended on a positive note in terms of wildlife at Yewfield…

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Yews at Yewfield

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 11th December 2016

Winter walking

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 20th November 2016

Time for the chores

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 30th October 2016

Late, great flowers

date calender icon Posted on Friday 7th October 2016

The season is changing

date calender icon Posted on Monday 5th September 2016

A week away!

date calender icon Posted on Friday 19th August 2016

Making hay

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 17th July 2016

A day out

date calender icon Posted on Thursday 7th July 2016

It’s not often that gardeners get a chance for an overnight outing …

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Natures colour fest

date calender icon Posted on Monday 20th June 2016

As the season’s change so do the predominant colours that go with them.

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Good news for Yewfield’s forest

date calender icon Posted on Friday 10th June 2016

Visits to Yewfield

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 22nd May 2016

It has been a week of visits to the gardens and woodlands of Yewfield …

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Ponies, chickens and slugs

date calender icon Posted on Wednesday 4th May 2016

Apologies for missing a post. April was a busy month. For gardeners it has to be the busiest. On the 1st of May we took our ponies away to summer pasture.

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It has been an educational weekend

date calender icon Posted on Tuesday 5th April 2016

It has been an educational weekend especially for thinking outside the box…

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Planting tomorrow’s forests

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 20th March 2016

We have been planting trees up in the larch plantation just off to the left of the footpath up to Tarn Hows…

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Winter twiggery

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 6th March 2016

We all know about autumn colour and the explosion of multiple greens in spring but …

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Good grazers

date calender icon Posted on Monday 22nd February 2016

This wet winter

date calender icon Posted on Friday 5th February 2016

If you live in the UK you can scarcely have failed to notice that last weekend many of us were counting birds in our gardens

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From the ridiculous to the sublime

date calender icon Posted on Saturday 16th January 2016

From the ridiculous to the sublime. Over the past few days sun and snow and sub zero temperatures…

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Hope springs eternal

date calender icon Posted on Monday 4th January 2016

Writing this at the end of December, Storm Frank, the third major storm here in Cumbria this month, is lashing the windows…

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Floods in Cumbria

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 13th December 2015

In spite of experiencing yet another ‘one in a hundred year flood event’ here in Cumbria (the last one was 6 yrs ago)…

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Up here in the Lake District…

date calender icon Posted on Monday 30th November 2015

Up here in the Lake District we have been experiencing one Atlantic front after another…

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Don’t you love November…

date calender icon Posted on Wednesday 11th November 2015

Don’t you love November…

No really. Leaves to rake and stack, garlic and tulips to plant and hay rattle seed to sow. Hay or yellow rattle Rhinanthes minor has to be sown with this year’s seed…

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Harvest

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 1st November 2015

A lingering autumn has almost made up for the miserably damp summer we had.

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Surveying Yewfield

date calender icon Posted on Thursday 15th October 2015

Ever since we arrived at Yewfield 22 years ago we have been asking what grows here and who shares this land with us.

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Pests and predators at Yewfield

date calender icon Posted on Wednesday 23rd September 2015

How to deal with pests and predators at a vegetarian guest house and County Wildlife Site is an ongoing dilemma…

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Managing land in the Lake District with a vegetarian ethos

date calender icon Posted on Saturday 12th September 2015

That phrase sounds like a contradiction in terms. The Lake District’s landscape has been shaped by centuries of sheep and cattle farming. It is still the dominant form of land management here. Grass is what we grow best or so we are told. So is it possible to look after the land and contribute positively to it’s landscape without having to raise sheep and cattle for meat?

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WWOOFING at Yewfield

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 30th August 2015

From April to November we are a host farm for volunteers from an organization called WWOOF…

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Our Bees Are Spoiled For Choice

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 2nd August 2015

It has been largely cool, wet and windy this past week but that hasn’t kept our bees in the hive. The lime trees are still in blossom, bramble in the hedgerow is in full flower, heather on Tom Heights above Tarn Hows paint the hillside pink and purple, clover speckles white and red in the still uncut hay meadows and garden flowers such as geranium, astrantia, campanula and daisy, all good nectar and pollen plants for bees still dance in cool breeze. Next week rosebay willow herb will be out, another favourite bee plant.

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Flower, flowers everywhere!

date calender icon Posted on Thursday 23rd July 2015

In the garden we try to incorporate wild flowers along with more conventional perennials and shrubs to make it attractive to our bees and other pollinating insects. This year has been a good year for our bees and it seems for bumble bees as well as the garden hums with the sound of them.


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Yewfield gardens and land

date calender icon Posted on Sunday 12th July 2015

Welcome to our Gardeners’ Blog. We will be putting entries in every fortnight with the purpose of informing you as to what is happening in the gardens and land here at Yewfield.


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