Good Friday feeling.

Oh how blissful - a long weekend and fabulous warm Spring days, full of light from 6.00am till sunset. The chickens are loving being out all day although the downside of it is that you cannot make any noise without them thinking there's a chance of easy food and then you have a charge of waddling feathered shapes and a guilt the size of a Mother's love until they are thrown a handful of seed to placate them thereby fulfilling their belief that they'll get fed.

I've brought the laptop outside to type this whilst enjoying the birdsong and the warmth of an early morning sun and as I look out I can see the lazy chickens already sated after bread, seeds and layers pellets. Luke and I have walked around the garden and I've talked him through the things I did yesterday (planting up the new thymes, lavender and rosemary, digging over the patch of next door's garden which blends into ours so I can get rid of some of the weeds and most significantly for me, digging up the last bit of bamboo which had escaped our first attempt of eradicating it last year)

I really need to enlarge the herb garden but that's a common fault of mine; making a space and then realising I can't get anything else in it.

Do you remember when I first made the herb garden about seven months ago? I'd designed it to scroll around in front of the greenhouse but I'd already got the corner border planted so I was limited for space. I did a sort of S shape in box and put my standard bay in the larger circle as a sort of focal point and then put in a rosemary at the other end. Well, the harsh and prolonged winter we had put paid to that idea when it killed off the bay which I have dug up, cut right back and re-potted and is now throwing up new shoots. The rosemary too was growing very unevenly (I'm rubbish at pruning rosemary and lavenders – I don't know why I haven't got the idea yet after so many years but I don't have success with pruning either of these whereas my roses (which often scare people about how and when to prune) seem to be thriving. Still, there's time for me to kill those off so I shouldn’t' be so bold with my claims.

If you needed a lesson on the birds and the bees you could do no better than be sitting in this garden right now. I'm surrounded by fat bumble bees, hover flies,.wasps, honey bees, a variety of birds dancing in the sky and a chorus of tweets and chirps from every direction.

There must be plenty of food for the birds right now because the tits have not been feasting on the peanuts as they have been doing for months. Where until recently they were emptying the two feeders on a daily basis we are now only having to top them up once a week.

The majestic oak is now resplendent in a new emerald-bright coat of green leaves and obscures the birds resting in it from sight.

It's been so hot that Luke's tomato seeds have sprung up and been frazzled in their trays so he'll need to start again. I'll be sewing my second row of Tommy peas today, almost two weeks after the first ones were planted so we can enjoy them fresh for a longer season. I'll do the same again in two more week's time which will extend my joy when plucking peas straight from the pod and popping them into my mouth to release that sweetness that comes from their absolute freshness.

We're going to have a quick drive around the lanes in a while so I can show Luke how glorious the fields of yellow rape look against the blue of the sky and then I may just hop into the hammock to catch up on my latest book group read, Birdsong.