(For a pictorial 2025, you can have a look at our Gallery)

It has been a fun year and very productive in general. We discovered that we have a lot more cherry plums than realised – this year we saw what seemed to be a mast year for these small plum type fruits – the hedgerows were full of these small colourful fruits.

This year started with some more thinning of the 11 year old woodland to create more space for selected trees.  This space allows remaining trees to fill out and retain growth in the lower sections.  Where there is less light reaching through the trees, some lower branches have given up – St. Joseph’s Specialist Trust have helped with the tidying up of the trees and habitat piles have been created with the trimmings.

We were pleased with a first proper crop of a ‘seedless’ grape this year in the polytunnel.  It seems that not all seedless grapes are necessarily completely seedless, which was a learning curve.  ‘Seedless’ grapes may have less well developed seeds than regular varieties, and so can be eaten in their entirety.  More to learn about varieties here.

We didn’t have the best year for bees.  We caught a swarm which didn’t stay and a weaker colony died out, harangued by wasps.  We will try again with a new colony next year.

We had some real beauties in the fruit department as you can see in the gallery for 2025.  I think we must have had double the crop of last year.  There were so many apples and a successful crop of pears and quince.  In some years we have had frost damage to pears, producing a gnarly inedible fruit, but no sign of that this year.  Red Falstaff apples have been very impressive and consistent in their productivity over the years – masses of apples this year, great staying power on the trees and a popular crunchy enjoyable apple – released from the tree with a very neat and satisfying roll up of the fruit.  Laxton’s Fortune showed what they could do this year with a pleasing eat and easy on the eye.  Red Pixie a local variety have not been very productive and we only have a couple of these trees, but the fruit produced has been very pleasant to eat and described by a volunteer as like an old traditional type of apple.

It has been great to have had plenty of apples to share with local food banks, The Godalming Community Store and St. Mark’s Food Bank, Open Grounds Cafe, charities, organisations and volunteers.  We are always interested in good causes able to make use of our produce.  Please contact us, if you have suggestions.

We have been taking our cider apples to Barnard’s Cider for a return on apples donated and made a new connection with Misty Moon Cider  in Farnham who have visited us and picked apples.

Out and about, as part of the Pollinate project – networking and sharing knowledge and skills, a visit has been made to Farncombe Community Garden, West Horsley Place and Hydons Flower Farm.  For future ideas on sharing experience and supporting each other, please do get in touch.

As usual, the Garden House would be so much less without the great people who bring the place to life!

Thank you so much to all those who have helped the project to thrive.  You are wonderful!

To name but a few, thanks to Simon for feeding the birds, Ben for diversifying the garden with a multitude of interesting plants and sharing a wealth of knowledge, The Growth team from Surrey Choices and Halow for sticking with us for years of practical support, St. Joseph’s for helping with tasks around the estate, Miriam for keeping us in order, Nic for running The Workshop and to Andrew and Caroline Hunter for making it all happen! 

Andy Holdaway, 18th Dec., 2025.