The folia website has been a real boon to me in keeping track of the garden. I can’t remember when I first signed up to it but it is only since moving into my present house in the summer of 2010 that I have been assiduous about keeping records.

That means I now have a year and a half of data and, for many of the plants, I am seeing them in their second winter. Not the tree spinach (pictured above), which wasn’t started until 4 March, but it is reassuring to look back and see, for example, that my Hamamelis was only noted as flowering on 9 January last year. I think it is running a bit behind schedule but not as much as I had feared.

Of course, the data is very patchy; I tend to notice plants when they are doing things like blooming or harvesting, but at least it gives me a record of how my plants are doing in my conditions.