It’s Sunday 13 October 2019. We are soaked in low cloud after many months of drought, so I and the garden are beyond happy. I’ve been waiting for the period of constant slow drip. It comes every year around now and is forecast to last at least another three days. That would have felt interminable when I lived in a basement flat in the UK, but here I know it will end and the sun will return. We will have bright sunny, if chilly, days for much of the winter.

Come and take a stroll with me around the garden. It’s an acre of steep hillside from which I have been developing a garden for the past six years. Previously it was a stony schist scree of Grenache grapevines in the Faugères AOC. They had been treated with all the usual chemicals over the years and once the vines had become unproductive and grubbed up the owner of the land treated with glyphosate to rid it of weeds. It was grey and lifeless when we decided to build here. Since 2012 there have been no chemicals used on the land and I have been working to feed the soil, to let nature do its work. I’ve planted over 50 trees and many hundreds of plants, maybe thousands. We’ve created a pond and allowed it to be as natural as possible. The garden is now home to a wide range of wildlife from rabbits to woodcock, lizards to dragonflies, hedgehogs to snakes and many thousands of bees, wasps and other pollinators. It is a young garden, but it’s just beginning to settle into its skin, to mature little by little. I practise no-dig gardening. That is to say, the garden is never forked or dug, I simply add more and more organic material to the surface of flower or vegetable beds as mulch and compost. Any weeds are either very lightly hoed when extremely young or pulled by hand after rain. If they grow during the summer I just have to wait until the soil becomes more friable, like now. So here’s my soggy garden, this morning. Unweeded, unpruned and in all its glory.

Do have a look at the produce from the garden so far this year. All no-dig and organic.